Welcome back to this week’s edition of 2-Minute Tuesdays where we are talking to you about one exercise topic for two minutes and giving you three reasons why you should take our advice. This week we are talking about differences between exercising for your health versus exercising for sport.
1) Stop Sacrificing Your Body
The number one thing to keep in mind when exercising for your health is that you must stop sacrificing your body to do the exercise. The whole goal of sports is to win, lift more weight than others, or to beat your last time. The goal of exercise for health is one thing – to improve your body. You have to stop sacrificing your body to get exercises done because that is more sport-related rather than health-related.
Action Tip: Focus on your body when you are exercising. End your workout before your body says it has had enough.
2) Leave Your Ego At The Door
Tip number two – leave your ego at the door. Now, this is tough, especially if you got into exercising because you were formerly an athlete. When you are exercising for your health, you are there to improve your body. It does not matter what you came in planning to do, you have to listen to your body and respect what your body is telling you and leave your ego out of the equation.
Action Tip: Meet your body where it is at each day. Don’t try comparing how you did last time to this time or how you are doing now compared to others. Remember that your exercise is for your body. Nothing else.
3) Be Mindful Of Your Exercise Environment
The last tip to help you exercise for health instead of exercise for sport is to be mindful of the environment you put yourself in. If you are always exercising at a gym that is very sports-focused, it is going to be very hard for you to not feel tempted to go do the sports-related activities or to do activities where you are sacrificing your body. Make sure you find a gym or a place to exercise where you feel comfortable to listen to your body and to slow down so you can actually improve your body.
Action Tip: Assess your exercise environment. Look around you and see if everybody else is there for the same or similar reason as yourself.
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2 Comments
Laurie Dring · February 15, 2017 at 3:36 pm
Dear Charlie & Julie – I really appreciate your informative posting.
Being mindful of your expertise, I had to do a hip yoga today. Rather than stretching, I activated my traps, pecs & glutes where appropriate. My purpose was to work more my hip joints.
Attached is the 22 min hip yoga. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWYBPhDeztU — hope you don’t mind.
Charlie Cates · February 17, 2017 at 2:44 pm
Thanks for sharing, Laurie! Great job on keeping your focus on activating your muscles instead of stretching them!
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