Why

I was going to title this, “Why people don’t exercise”, but I wasn’t sure anyone would open it since the mere mention of the word “exercise” sends some people into a flurry of frustration and disgust. (Even me at times, so at a Facebook post’s prompting, I changed “working out” to “dancing with life”!) With regards to the title of this post, I went with plain ol’ “Why”, and if you’re still reading this, cool – let me tell you why people don’t exercise (and some other stuff, but that first).

First things first: when you exercise – especially when you lift weights – muscles experience little tears (like a paper does when you rip it, not like the things your eyes produce when you’re sad). That tearing of the muscles causes a kind of “burning” sensation, and, quite frankly, it kind of sucks. It’s really uncomfortable to feel that burn, so people avoid it. Also because they don’t see results the day after they begin, so they become impatient and stop. Also because they’ve convinced themselves they “don’t have time”. Ugh. That is the worst excuse ever! I would much rather someone say, “I don’t want to exercise” than ever hear ever again the words, “I”, “don’t”, “have”, and “time” strung together to explain why someone doesn’t exercise. And they’re right, they don’t have time, it’s not just sitting there in a box waiting for them to take it out and use it. They can, however, make time by managing the time they do have, better.

Anyway, what we’ve established is that people don’t like the burning feeling that accompanies exercising, which makes sense. I don’t particularly like feeling that burn, either, though it doesn’t stop me from dancing with life on a regular basis.

There’s another reason people avoid that feeling, though: they don’t like getting uncomfortable. I don’t mean just “being” uncomfortable, like sleeping in an airplane seat. I mean getting uncomfortable, like doing something outside of their comfort zone. People really don’t like that feeling. I can totally understand why, too – it’s much like the feeling of burning muscles. The thing is, though, that the same way the muscles burn for only a few seconds at a time, the discomfort of being outside of their comfort zone goes away after a short period of actually being outside of it. In other words, the same way anyone can learn to push through the burning feeling of the muscles tearing, they can learn to push through that uncomfortable feeling and know that 1) it won’t last even remotely close to forever, and 2) it’s going to help them grow in ways they could never begin to imagine, and in ways that no other thing they could do would ever provide for them.

It’s the same way you build muscle – first, you have to tear it down a bit, then it rebuilds itself stronger than it was before.

Stepping outside of your comfort zone will always result in feeling a little bit torn down – that’s going to happen. Once you’re outside of it, though, and continually flexing that [figurative] muscle, after a while, you won’t even realize it’s tearing. You’ll just naturally focus on its strength.

And, just like regular arm or leg muscles, soon you’ll want to flex it.

So grab a weight and feel the burn.

It’s so worth it.