Is it About Looking Good or Feeling Good?

When you exercise, are you thinking about your looks or how you are moving? If you are focused, you should be thinking about how your body moves and feels. It seems obvious, but since many people start working out to LOOK a certain way, I had to ask. I’m curious – why did you start working out? And why do you keep doing it? 

No matter what your answer is, you are going to get both from exercising! If you invest time, practice, consistency, and mindset, your body will respond and get stronger, happier, and reshape itself. The best part? You don’t even need to think about how you look for it to happen. 

Focus on Progress

Whatever your original intentions, setting small goals in order to make progress is key. My daughters have a friend who only does calisthenics (body weight exercises). For him, he wants to keep getting stronger. To watch him achieve something like single arm pushups is truly amazing! It can be easy to see someone doing “clapping” push ups and think “I could never do that”, especially if you can’t even do one.

You know the saying, every journey starts with the first step. Once you hit the goal of your first pushup, then you move on to five. The impressive calisthenics exercises their friend does is the product of months and years of practice. What comes alongside all of that practice is that your body starts to reshape itself – but not because you focused on how it looks. 

Read: Lasting Change Takes Time

Running to lose weight is another example of how focusing on progress, not just the end goal, is so important. Running is great cardio and can help you lose weight – but running on its own won’t get you there. Instead, try to think about small steps to improve your running. Some small steps could be: 

• Try running a certain distance without stopping.
• Then aim to run that distance a bit faster, or go further in the same time.
• Look at what nutrition changes might give you more energy to run.
• What about your hydration?
• If you improve your sleep, will you perform better? 
• Will weight training make your legs stronger and thus help you run longer?

The next thing you know, in order to meet a performance goal you have also made some lifestyle changes, and in return your body has changed. There is always another goal to set (and achieve) when you stop to celebrate what your body can do, and consider where you started. 

We All Start Somewhere

Social media, magazines, and advertisements often depict a “look”. We need to remember that those models get paid to look a certain way. They may be naturally very thin, athletic, be sixteen years old, have unhealthy habits, or be seasoned athletes who train daily with personal trainers and dieticians. If you work out to look a certain way – especially to match what unrealistic media is showing you – you are going to be disappointed. 

When you exercise to feel good, strong, and confident in what your body can do, everything changes. And when you hit that first tiny goal, it feels SO GOOD! The first time I did a rollup in Pilates was such an achievement, and I love seeing the pride in my clients’ faces when they master a challenging movement. 

Can you do a rollup in Pilates, keeping your feet down and not using your hands for help? If not, we break it down into smaller parts. Maybe use your hands for support, or only rolling up and down part way. With practice, you will soon be able to roll the full way, and it will feel AMAZING. Then you’ll be able to do it with no hands – SPECTACULAR! 

We need to take pride in what our bodies are capable of, by focusing on performance goals and the progress we can make.

If you are struggling to break your big goals down into smaller ones or are just feeling stuck, let’s chat and get you making progress again!