by Michael Plank
Every day you come in to the gym, you have the opportunity to check and control two things: your attitude and your effort.
Those things are available to you regardless of your talent, regardless of your fitness, regardless of your mood or energy levels. They’re available if the workout your doing is one you love or one you hate. They’re available if you’re working out with your best friends, or if you’re in a room full of strangers. They’re within your control if you love the playlist or if the music isn’t something you’d pick in a thousand years.
For exercise to work, it needs to cause an adaptation. For an adaptation to happen, there has to be a stimulus outside of what you regularly encounter. If it’s a stimulus outside of what you regularly encounter, there’s probably going to be something about it that’s hard.
You will always encounter friction points in exercise. It’ll be a movement you struggle with, or a weight that feels heavy, or a pace that feels hard. You might be working around an injury.
And you might not control that stuff.
But you can control how you respond to it. You can control whether you slump your shoulders and shake your head and think about how much you hate it, or whether you take a deep breath, square up, and rise to the challenge.
That’s a skill.
It’s one that takes practice, and it’s one that you can improve through practice.
This matters because it’s a skill that can keep you exercising for your whole life. But there’s even more to it than that.
The world feels crazy right now. Political turmoil, AI advances, cold, snow, and ice in ways we’re out of practice with handling, bird flu, inflation, labor strikes, and on and on. I haven’t seen social media be this doom-scroll heavy since the early days of the pandemic in 2020.
And when the world seems crazy it seems to often lead to one of two behaviors: 1) paralysis. Everything is so overwhelming we just do nothing. Or 2) massive amounts of online posting which feels like doing something, but seldom has any tangible impact.
And although this is always true, especially when things feel hard or crazy, there’s a third option: to put what you’ve learned in the gym into practice and to focus on what is actually within your control.
Can you personally change the weather? No. Can you personally change national or state policy? No. Can you personally transform the economy or the climate? No. Can you make it so that the tragedy that happened to you didn’t happen? No.
But there’s a ton that you can do.
You can work on your attitude and your effort.
You can get in a workout, drink some water, eat some nutrient-dense food, and give yourself adequate time for a good night’s sleep.
You can be a good spouse, a good parent, a good friend, a good neighbor.
You can talk to a coach or a therapist or a counselor or a pastor who’s willing to have honest conversations with you about how you can show up as your best self.
You can vote and call your representatives.
You can work to build good relationships.
And those things might not sound like much, but actually, they are incredibly powerful. They can be, quite literally, life-changing. And not just for you, but for the people around you. It’s classic ripple-effect stuff, where focusing on what you can control sends waves throughout your circles.
Deadlifting a lot, running fast, jumping high… all of that is cool.
But truly understanding and acting on what is in your control?
That’s superhero stuff.