One of our Core Values at Underwood Park CrossFit is Integrity. Among other things, that means not lying to people. It means telling the truth.
And here’s the truth:
Working out can be hard.
I know that doesn’t sound groundbreaking, but bear with me here.
For exercise to cause any change in your body, there must be an adaptation. If there’s going to be an adaption, there must be stress to the system that your body can respond to. If there’s going to be stress, there has to be a stimulus that somehow disrupts your baseline. If it’s going to disrupt your baseline – where you are, by definition, most comfortable – you must do something that is, on at least some level, uncomfortable.
We all know this.
And I’m not saying that unless you’re gasping for air, shaking from exertion, and sore from head to toe it doesn’t count. Not at all. But for exercise to work, there will be some level of physical stress.
That’s what we call a friction point. A friction point is anything you have to overcome to get to where you want to be.
Everything has friction points. But one of the reasons exercise is so hard for so many people is that the physical discomfort of it is only one friction point.
Other potential ones are:
- The schedule doesn’t align with your favorite time
- The session you want isn’t the ones your friends go to
- It’s dark early and you don’t want to go out
- It’s light late and you do want to go out, but not to the gym
- You don’t like the music
- You don’t enjoy the activity
- Your kids ask you to skip the gym just for tonight!
And there are about a billion more. And that’s fine, but a person will only tolerate so many friction points before it’s too much.
Then, add to that, that if you’re not at a gym already, you have to overcome the enormous friction point of starting in the first place: meeting new people, learning new things, feeling like a beginner again, and putting yourself out there.
Then if you try a place for a few weeks or months and it’s not a good fit, you have to do all of that all over again.
It’s a lot.
I have so much sympathy for that. I completely understand why so many people quit gyms and why so many people never start in the first place.
Starting at a gym and sticking with it for long enough to make a lasting lifestyle-level change is, just by itself, an incredible achievement. It’s hard.
I hope that a lot of you who are reading this are patting yourselves on the back for doing that hard thing.
And I’d guess that some of you reading this are probably saying, “It is hard! So what am I supposed to do?”
And to you who are saying that, I’ll tell you that one of my very favorite things about doing the work I do, and have been doing for more than a decade, is that, every day, I see people do things that are hard. Those people are young and they’re old, they’re fast and they’re slow, they’re gifted athletes and total beginners, they’ve gotten clean bills of health from doctors and they’ve had doctors seriously concerned about them. And it’s convinced me that people – all people, with no exceptions – are capable of doing hard things.
If you tell me something is hard, and it is hard, I promise that I won’t ever lie to you and tell you that it’s not.
But I also promise that I will tell you that it’s ok that it’s hard.
Because you can do hard things. And we’ll believe in you until you believe in yourself.