Getting Comfortable With The Uncomfortable

Admit it, you have probably heard that before and passively thought of it, I know I have.

We are a month in of quarantine, and we have probably experienced waves of different emotions. Have your at-home outfits become a little more strange looking? Did you not know what to do with yourself so you just ended up doing nothing? Did you pick up an unconventional hobby like making claymation or perfecting the calzon? (Hear me out my Parks and Rec friends…)

As a society, we are trying our best to find the balance of staying calm, staying entertained, and adapting to this new “lifestyle”. However, many of us have been completely thrown off our trajectory, and we are trying to scramble for the life we once had or need to recreate.

Routines are great, don’t get me wrong, but long-term routines leave you with less time and opportunity for growth. I feel we subconsciously fear that growth until life rips that “normalcy” out of our hands and we are left in a way to fend for ourselves.

I have experienced this greatly physically and emotionally in the last few years. A lighter and relevant example of this is when I sprained my wrist in the summer of 2016. I was at the peak of my fitness and had really fallen in love with my personal progress. 

Yeah. No Chill At All.

Yes, a wrist sprain sounds like no big deal, but I was extremely limited in my workouts: no gripping barbells and dumbbells, no TRX or kettlebell swings, I even had to take a week off work to start the healing process. I felt so unmotivated and frustrated with this change and worried it would be more challenging to continue my progress.

That’s when my good friend became my very first trainer, and I had never felt so much support from a fitness perspective in my years of being in the industry myself. He reminded me that there are many uncontrollables in life: my injury, my current limitations, even heavy personal life issues that were creating piles of stress.

But with my current situation, the one thing I did have control over were my fitness goals. 

He helped with my programming and nutritional accountability. He was presesnt during my hikes and walks to increase my NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis), and even helped me with unloading my weights.

I was able to not only lose a pound a week, I also was losing a percentage of body fat each week and my legs had never been stronger! 

If this setback never happened, would I have ever taken that different route that led me to both a stronger physical and mental self? To be honest, probably not.

Fast forward to the end of 2019 working with a client I had been training for three years. She loved her heavy strength training and her group fitness classes:

Monday’s were an 8:30AM HIIT class, Tuesday’s were a barbell class, Thursday’s 6:00PM strength training with me, etc.. Then one day she came into our session with a hairline fracture on her left wrist, ironically the same side as my injury.

She was told to not do any gripping or certain exercises for 2-3 months, just like my injury. She started to cry, she was worried about her progress and “losing it”. I told her that this was a beautiful opportunity to get uncomfortable and change the trajectory of your progress.

Progress is never linear; there will always be small and great highs and lows, and we tend to forget this on our fitness journey.

Her sessions were challenging, they felt different, and would thank me after feeling relieved. The new changes actually were progressions to her, and not only was she feeling sore and accomplished after, there was movement of that anxious energy that was released. 

The reality of all this is something we cannot control. The stay-at-home order is for another 3 weeks, but that also might be prolonged. We need to shift our perspective instead of putting our lives on hold.

We are completely allowed those days to watch Tik Toks for three hours (guilty), or go for a walk and call that “exercise” for that day (guilty, but no shame). 

However, this is the time to really focus on our mental health, our bodies that are limited with the availability to move more, and to maintain a nutrient dense diet.

I mean, if the Notorious RBG can train with her trainer from a social distance, there’s hope for the rest of us…

What’s holding you back today?