Pain is that being out of shape is painful.  If you don’t believe me, try this experiment.  Pick something off the floor and put it on the shelf above your head.  If you can do this without any discomfort, twisting or grunting, then congratulations.   You are not out of shape.  Yet.  

The physical pain of being out of shape will come later, and it will be really painful.  The heart attack. The diabetes.   The pulled hamstring.  And there’s the pain right now.  The loss of breath when you walk up stairs.  The twinge in your back when you bend over to pick up the new dog.   The heartburn when you eat crap.  These little pains are warnings of the bigger, more disastrous pains to come.  Doing nothing about the pains now does not make you a tough guy.  It just makes you vulnerable.  There is no "how can I better myself" answer that involves "do nothing."

  1. Eliminate your bad habits.  This covers the obvious unhealthy bad habits, like smoking and drinking.  It also includes bad habits that affect your health, like getting proper sleep and dealing with stress and not internalizing it.

  2. Get your appropriate amount of rest.  Most programs focus on how much sleep you get.  That is very important.  Just as important is getting rest throughout the day and monitoring your energy levels.  If that means taking it easy in early afternoon, then that is what you need.

  3. Find the activity you can do every day.  Your fitness routine is almost always built around an activity.  Whether that is yoga, martial arts, calisthenics, or some other activity, it must be the one you can do consistently.  All the studies and reports about how effective one program or the other is are meaningless is you simply don’t do it.

  4. Replace bad snacks with better snacks.  This is a small discipline, but very important.   You should eventually change or eliminate the habit of snacking.  But until that happens, you can replace bad snacks with good snacks.  Even if it is as little as substituting pretzels for potato chips, or frozen grapes for fruit gummy snacks, the effect will be seen. And felt.

  5. Develop your own nutrition program.  Nutrition is a huge field.  New studies are reported almost daily, and many are contradictory.   It is not necessary for you to become an expert in nutrition.  But you do need to know enough to be able to make healthy choices.  And your nutrition program should be personal to you.

You may feel okay.  You may say that those aches and pains are just part of growing older.  Try that approach with your car.  Sure, we’ve all turned up the radio to drown out a funny sound.  But if that funny sound is the flap-flap-flap of a tire losing pressure, you will have a huge repair bill on your hand and a ruined car.  Working on getting fit is not painful, but it may be uncomfortable.  The alternative is both painful and uncomfortable.  Not really much of a bargain there.

The solution is to have a comprehensive system that includes fitness as a key component.  If your goal is simply to get fit, then a fitness program will achieve that goal.  But if your goal is to improve all aras of your life, the fitness needs to be a major component of that system.  But your system should also be personalized to you, and flexible to grow and change with you.  Because you will not be the same person halfway through your development as you were at the beginning.  Your system needs to also grow and develop.  The answer to "how can I better myself" revolves around the "I".

STRESS JUDO COACHING is designed to be that comprehensive system.  Fitness is one of the modules in the Brown Belt training level.  Designed around the exclusive progressive belt training system, this unique training and coaching program can be personalized, for you to reach your black belt potential. Just JOIN THE COMMUNITY using the box to the right (-->) and welcome!