The Power Within… Just Change Your Mind

Competition for Life!

Are you a goal setter when it comes to accomplishing health and fitness achievements? I was reading an article from the Denver Post that interviewed a number of personal trainers and the advice that they gave regarding training their clients this new year. I’d say out of the six trainers interviewed only one of them made it sound like they even considered life-long training techniques. It was clear that most of them oriented their clients towards an event or a physical challenge as their goal for their personal fitness training; meaning that they wanted their clients to train for a triathlon or sign up for a 5k run during the summer. The newspaper article presented these trainers as more “athletic event” trainers, for both themselves and their clients, instead of “life oriented” trainers.

A couple of years ago, one of my staff members complimented me on my dedication to strength training and asked me “what I was training for?” I told her that I wasn’t training for anything; I was just doing one of my 3 days of strength training per week. She looked at me like I was crazy! I asked why she thought that I needed to be training for something and her response was that she wouldn’t have the same motivation if there wasn’t a competition of some sort at the end of the training. I remember thinking to myself, “hmmm, then I suppose I’m training for life because I don’t want this motivation to end until I’m pushing up daisies!”

It’s an interesting comparison, those who need to train for some big event (or under a particular direction) to those who can just train for life. Not to say that either motivation is wrong! It’s understood that training and participating in an athletic event, whether it’s a 3-day walk for breast cancer or a series of back country triathlons, will leave you in terrific physical condition. It’s just as important to understand how daily, weekly and monthly training regimens without an ending athletic event is equally as important to lifelong health and function; or, could it be more important?

So what’s your motivation? I think it’s an important question. Do you need challenges and ending competitions in order to motivate your actions, or are you challenged enough with keeping a regular schedule and routine going just for life’s sake? ‘Cause that’s what life-long health and fitness is all about. The final competition for all of your exercise and health is not a pleasant goal to think about when you put it in terms of achieving life-long goals and function until the end. I’ll tell you what, if you did think of it in a way as a competition for life, a competition to remain functional, a competition to remain independent and to be able to romp around on the floor with your grandchildren would that make it an activity easier to accomplish every week? Just a thought!

So speaking of competitions, we hold some fun and simple ones throughout the year at our facility and we just finished the Winter Challenge! This was the second year that we held this challenge due to its popularity last year. It was a challenge designed to help individuals focus on maintaining weight throughout the holiday feeding frenzy. The idea of the challenge is to maintain your body weight by weighing in every month for the four consecutive months. The goal is to not gain weight during the holidays!

I was amazed at the results. Only 10 people dropped out of the competition and of the remaining 17, ten of those individuals managed to lose 100.5 pounds! This competition encouraged everyone to focus on their eating whether it was to avoid gaining or to actually lose weight. All I know is that everyone who completed it are happy with their results. Way to go!

So there you have it, a little competition will never hurt any of us! Whether you like them or not, you need to understand what drives your motivations and capture that competitive (or not competitive) energy! ‘Cause no matter what, your daily health and fitness is for the “Competition of Life!”

Deborah Holmes

January 20, 2009