Some Surprising Ways Our Gym Will Change You (no, not just your your glutes…your mind)

By Dafne Alayon, PhD

You probably didn’t join our gym because you thought you lacked mental toughness, or needed better coping skills in life.  But did you know you probably have developed both as a consequence of your hard work and commitment to coming?  Here are some (maybe) surprising ways working out in our particular fashion will impact you personally (from a psychologist’s perspective).

  1. Constantly Varied exercise means frequent exposure to surprise and challenges:  Everyday that you come to exercise, your workout is different.  That means that you cannot predict what kind of obstacle or challenge your workout will present to you each day.  Do you remember first starting and feeling nervous about workouts containing particular movements?  Thrusters, cleans, burpees, handstand pushups, etc.  We all know the movements that challenge us.  The movements that make our adrenaline surge in our chests, the ones that make our tummies feel a little queasy.  They spike our cortisol levels when we see them programmed!  Perhaps there are still some movements you find challenging, but the level of anxiety you face drops drastically as your nervous system habituates to your exposures to the movements.  We can consider this an example of practicing managing mini-stressors. Over time, you may not even notice your internal monologue move from “I’m not going to class today, we are doing thrusters,” to, “I don’t want to do the workout today, it’s going to suck,” to, “Thrusters today.  It’s gonna suck and I’m going to get it done!”  In life, we do not have a tendency to move toward challenges. We instead seek comfort any way we can find it.  We are also often overextended and overstressed in our daily lives, which leads to minimal tolerance and bandwidth for coping with unforeseen obstacles.  The practice of coming to the gym, seeing what your task will be, moving through your feelings about it, and seeing yourself get it done, changes how you cope with surprises outside of the gym too.  In the gym, we make it a habit of constantly approaching challenges in order to be better, and so our nervous system is developing ways to manage those feelings, and be less reactive when challenges find us.  When we feel overwhelmed, the part of our brains responsible for problem solving and planning take a back seat, making it difficult to find our way out of a problem.  But, the more we practice managing mini stressors, like we do in the gym, the better we get at remaining calm enough to make plans and manage whatever comes our way.  Pretty cool, huh?  
  2. Adaptability and Resilience Leads to Change in Self-Talk: 

Along with better coping skills, come resilience and change in self-talk.  The more obstacles and challenges you face in your physical (and let’s face it, mental) workouts, the more inevitable it is that your self-talk will change. And if it doesn’t happen naturally, you bet a coach will be there to nudge you.  You learn to move from saying, “I can’t do that,” to “I’m not there yet, what can I do to move closer to being able to?” or “I can’t do that, what else can I do to make it work?” You learn to say “Life has happened to me, how do I keep going instead of letting it ruin my goals?” The very best part is when, “What if I can’t get out of the squat because it’s too heavy and I can’t do it?” turns into, “I’m going to try this next hard set.  It might be so hard I’ll have to bail.”  The idea of possible failure isn’t terrifying anymore, it’s almost inevitable because of how hard you know you’re going to try!  Failing (or bailing on a lift for example) is normal and it’s part of the culture, it’s not a source of shame and embarrassment.  Think of all the ways that mindset translates to everyday life.  Maybe it’s starting a new job, maybe you’re in a different season of life that feels foreign and heavy (kids moved out to college, you’ve lost a relative, maybe you just had a baby and don’t recognize your body or your abilities), maybe you’re looking to start a new hobby or make new friends.  The mindset that teaches you that it’s better to put your all in and to expect potential failure on the road to accomplishing something special will ensure that you don’t stay paralyzed. Instead, you will feel the familiar feelings of movement in spite of fear.  You will know that when you have to bail, you just try again until you get to where you want to be, because you’ve done it before and that’s just the way of things.  That’s resilience, and you will notice it in the new ways you hear yourself talking to yourself.

  1. Stress Relief: Something many of our members describe is feeling a palpable stress relief from the challenging workouts. But the important part for them is that the stress relief translates to a greater bandwidth for other relationships outside of the gym.  The ability to tolerate more, connect more, and be more fully engaged in our everyday lives is so important.  Especially in an era that is increasingly individualistic, work-driven, and stressful.  I attribute the stress-reduction effect to a few things: 1. The incomparable feeling of pride and pleasure that comes from seeing yourself finish something concrete and difficult, 2. The release of endorphins after a workout, 3. Some stress is pre-verbal and isn’t ready to be expressed through words, it needs a physical outlet in a safe space, 4. Expression of stress around people who love you.  5. Our coaches will notice things you didn’t realize needed tending (maybe it’s an ache or a movement dysfunction, maybe it’s a change in your mood, maybe an unrelated life event is impacting your performance in the gym).  And in being tended to, you can go forth and tend to your life more peacefully.  

If you’ve been thinking about changing your health story but needed an extra push, hopefully this helps.  And if you’ve already been putting in all the work, hopefully you’re thinking of all the ways this blog resonates with you.  I am always in awe of the amazing ways we are able to change and grow when we just take the steps to try.  I am also always in awe of the ways choosing to work hard in the gym fundamentally changes how we think, and how we do life. We become heartier, more resilient, better able to chunk situations into more tolerable bits to tackle.  The game plan for how to attack a workout translates to the game plan for how to pack up a house and move.  In my case, the most distinct example I can remember is during the difficult delivery of my firstborn, being told I had to push her out right away, knowing it would hurt and I wasn’t ready.  My first thought was, “Treat it like Fran.  You know it’s going to hurt, just do it and get over it.”  It’s funny in a way, but I am also grateful I had so much practice building toughness, building a relationship with myself through hard tasks to know that I could trust myself to have the tools to make it through.  Next time you’re in the gym, pay attention to the words you speak to yourself and the thoughts you have–they may give you insight into areas that need some extra attention.  But you might also find you’ve grown in ways you didn’t even realize.  

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