1st Stumble

Happy Hump Day!!

I wasn’t planning on blogging today but I wanted to write about my first stumble in the challenge. As we all know, when you are training for something that is important and means a lot to you, bad days are something we don’t want to come across but they are inevitable. Well, yesterday was one of those days for me :(

Training was tough going, my shoulder and hip were giving me aggro meaning my lifts weren’t as strong as I would like, which left me down in the dumps and throwing a mini tantrum. It was a heavy fall from the high times I had been experiencing so far.  Normally this low feeling would eat at me for days/weeks until I finally snapped out of it – but yesterday something was different.

I returned to work feeling like I wanted to cry and wondering what had gone wrong overnight!

The answer: my mind-set.

The day had started with some bad news, I hadn’t slept well and my mind was going a million miles an hour. So although my body was in the studio, my mind wasn’t, resulting in me getting more and more frustrated at myself for not being “perfect” and progressing how I “should” be.

So, instead of wallowing in self-pity for having a bad day, niggling injuries and not being present in my session, I chose to change my attitude. Everyone experiences bad days, it’s how we deal with them and move on that makes us stronger, fitter or wiser. I put the session behind me and focused on the positives – I still put 100% into the session, I completed the session, I got the recovery process started straight away with a post w/o meal, and enjoyed the rest of my day knowing that I would be back in the gym on top form the following day.

Today I can look back and see that the session really wasn’t that bad, I did increase the weight on some exercises just not ALL of them. I also wondered what it was that made me change my attitude for the rest of the day. And I really believe it’s because since lifting weights and becoming stronger physically, I have become much stronger mentally. I have hit many stumbling blocks during my recovery and during training but have learnt from each experience and come back stronger each time.

I know throughout this challenge I will hit many more stumbling blocks and have days where things don’t go quite how I would like them too – but that’s life, and what’s important is how I pick myself up from them and move on regardless. No one said it was going to be easy, and I don’t expect it to be, but I will keep working hard every day because this is the journey towards what I want the most.

Sometimes in life it isn’t how hard you hit, but how hard you get hit and keep going.

How do you get over bad days and pick youselves up to hit the gym again?

It’s all about results