Don't Get Down On Yourself When Your Workouts Are Constantly Difficult.

Progressive: happening or developing gradually or in stages, proceeding step by step.

Resistance: the refusal to accept or comply with something; the attempt to prevent something by action or argument.

The confusion on why workouts are always hard

“Progressive resistance” is a fundamental concept in the fitness field. It merely means that you need to do an activity that challenges your current state, and when you can do more, you do. This is the only way that you will continually improve. To give you an example, when you read “Where the Wild Things Are “(Love this book!) when you were a child, it challenged your reading, comprehension, and imagination. But to read it now as an adult would not challenge you at all. It would be fun to reminisce, but defiantly not challenging. To get better at reading, you have to read more challenging books.

But often awareness is lost when it comes to people’s workout routines. Many people come up to me and say with some frustration that they thought after X amount of time, it would become easy. What?!

The reason why workouts have to always be challenging

I let them know that my first job is to provide treatments and exercises that don’t hurt the body and help you improve. My second job IS TO CHALLENGE YOU while providing support. 😉

Take a gander at the definitions above. Progressive happens gradually and slowly. Resistance is done with action. I know your ego says differently, and the health and fitness marketing machine leads you to believe that it magically happens in 4 weeks, but that ain’t life toots!

The solution on how to get through challenging workouts

To cure for this is, to begin with, acceptance. Accept where you are starting from. Accept the present moment during your workout and the challenges that are inherently there. This acceptance will allow you to first not fight against your current state and allow more progress, and it will also open space within you to realize the progress you are making.

There is no static in this life. You either slide backward or move forward. And moving forward requires you to work with progressive resistance to teach your body, mind, and spirit where you want to go.