As someone who believes in exercise as an absolutely critical part of living a quality life you'd think that I would love exercising. Well, sometimes, I do. Other times, I can't stand the thought of it. Last week it was the latter. I just needed to not work out. I did go for a few walks but I didn't go at an intensity level that I would call a workout.
Today I started back on P90X with Yoga X, an hour and a half long yoga marathon. After about 40 minutes I had had it. I was done. I looked at the clock to see there was still 50 minutes left and I just turned the DVD off. My heart wasn't in it. It was hurting too much and not in a good way. I decided 40 minutes was good for today. Since I had guilted myself to even do the workout at all I didn't want to pile on more guilt to get myself to finish. I knew that if I made myself continue it would be that much harder to get myself to workout tomorrow. Since the long term is what really counts here, I gave myself a break.
Now, don't get me wrong. Doing a half assed workout is not usually acceptable. Pushing yourself and getting the intensity up is important and it's important to do it most of the time. The thing is that perfectionism and torturing yourself with guilt are not going to serve the long term goals. The most important thing is that I'll be back at it tomorrow because I know I need to but also because I didn't make myself hate it today. And, since I didn't beat myself up today I should have plenty of energy tomorrow to "bring it!".
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