Life is full of stress. How you cope with your daily stressors will impact your fitness results.
Often we try to either avoid (fear) or destroy (anger) conditions that trigger stress. This biochemical reaction is based on a blend of our human genome, our life experiences, our current conditions, and our current state of health.
Over time these immediate and often strong reactions become fixed into our natural rhythms. We feel lost because it seems we're stuck in an endless loop of the same tensions triggering the same coping relapses inside of us.
But there's a better way to handle all your stressors in today's modern world --
Explore ways to become a better decision-maker.
Whether you seek to lose weight or build strength, making better decisions for yourself will set the stage for your successful fitness practice.
Exploring better decision-making starts by listening to your instincts and reactions. Deeper reflection into your character, exploring who you are, what matters to you, and why.
Exploring also requires deeper reflection into your body and brain processing. It's a discovery venture where you encourage yourself to ponder many unanswered questions. Imagining possible solutions for these big-picture issues will help you make better decisions.
Questions targeting your health and fitness include:
How am I reacting to specific stressors in my daily life?
How are these stressors impacting my energy cycles?
Is this altering my performance both physically and mentally?
What activities do I regularly engage in? Why? How is my body responding? How is my brain responding?
What do I want out of my fitness program? Why?
Do I live in a way that makes my fitness dreams possible?
Am I willing to change up my routines (meals, exercise, sleep)? If so, how and when?
Some broader helpful questions include:
What are my talents and skills, and why are they valuable to me?
What are my limitations, and why do I perceive them as limitations?
How do I handle high-stress situations? What helps me decompress?
What is my nature, what motivates me?
Answering these questions will give you clues whether you are handling your stressors properly to become stronger.
These clues will open new doors for you. You'll start creating a framework for your healthier decision-making process. You develop new daily constants (habits and routines) and lessen your daily variables, letting you treat those complex life stressors more productively.
You'll start to make decisions that will change how these stressors are impacting your health and performance. Your energy, focus, and creativity will improve because you'll have more constants and fewer variables.
Simply put, you'll become stronger both physically and mentally. Your lifeline will have fewer distractions, cleaner processes, and more clarity.
As your natural rhythms steadily improve, you'll have more bandwidth in your brain and body to properly channel your tensions, fine-tune your fitness cycles, and hit your goals much sooner.
In other words, the key to core strength training is taking your time to process, understand, and adapt to your stressors.
Stressors make you stronger when you channel them properly.
Here's a simple 3D strength plan:
Discover how they impact your health - body, brain, emotions, metabolism, energy.
Design practices to channel stressors properly so they fuel your strength instead of draining it.
Dare yourself to execute, making slight adaptations along the way as you rediscover and redesign.
This 3D template helps you create an inside-out solution for your stressors. You will craft healthier responses to your unhealthy reactions. Responding better to stress will trigger healthier inputs and conditions, allowing for greater performance with your body and brain.
Don't blindly follow textbook solutions from fitness experts or health professionals.
Instead, be wise and patient with yourself. Listen to the tunes your body and brain are playing.
Your fitness practice is an orchestra of interconnected rhythms within your body and brain. It takes time and grit to understand their combined power. But once you start making simple adaptations so that all the instruments in your fitness orchestra start playing the same tune, it opens a whole new world of possibilities :-)