How much do you think about your reasons for doing what you do? When you’re riding high it’s easy to answer that question. You can simply say about anything where you are being successful, ‘well I simply love it, of course. This is the best thing’. However, when time, injury or circumstances are not on your side then answering the question becomes less and less easy. At this point it’s worth checking in on whether your fundamental motivations could have changed….

For the last week I have mostly been dressed in gym clothes despite not darkening the doors of any gym. A bit like pretending to go to work and leaving the house in a suit only to go and eat a packed lunch in the park – gym no-show edition. The thinking was, if I keep wearing the kit then maybe the desire to train will come back?

I’ve just been a bit ill for a few weeks and felt a bit low and then I lost the love for it, and this week I thought ‘fuck it’ I need a proper rest and took the week off training. Unheard of, except when I had COVID, since I first started in 2017 (sad, I know).

This is normally when we start to reach for the language of ‘discipline’. Discipline is what would normally get me back to the gym routine. But, I am finding that discipline as a virtue in itself isn’t that attractive to me, or one that I need to prove to myself through training.

I have had no choice (like virtually all of my contemporaries) but to be somewhat badass and undertake really hard things in both work and family life in the last year or so… thus rendering my ability to push myself in the gym somewhat redundant, and in a way surplus to requirements. Whereas I was pushing, pushing, pushing to perform in lifts and competitions and prove my ‘strength’ to myself now I have found my ability to cope with life’s challenges outside the gym to have really tested and found me out, in a good way.

So there needs to be a more fundamental reason for me put that much effort in than to be able to say, ‘at least I was disciplined’. This does not feel like a good measure of me as a person. This shit is entirely voluntary. And there needs to be payback somewhere otherwise it is like being a giant hamster on a wheel of squat, bench, deadlift.

How do other people juggle with all of these competing priorities when the innate enthusiasm has temporarily (hopefully) left the building? Strip it back to the non negotiables I guess.

Last week I went through all of my future options for training or activities in general. This covered everything from gardening to pilates, group training to another competition, and No. 5 was to carry on strength training but hang on to the fundamentals as to why I am bothering….

….my gut said option No.5 is worth pursuing. Even when I have been feeling so removed and unenthused I still do not want to give up altogether. Why? Because the fundamental motivations are there. These have changed over time and definitely used to include the satisfaction of being disciplined, doing hard stuff, being badass. But this time around they are pretty basic:

1. Strength training is the best thing I can do for my body, health and physical capabilities, both now and in the long term
2. I like the strong body I have now better than any previous version, even though I am no longer young

So strength training is still must, for me at least (and probably for everyone). The reasons are sound and entirely authentic to me – including short and long term benefits which mean that hopefully when I feel properly better I will be back in the gym, and maybe learn to love it again too…..

What are you non negotiables that you need in your life? Do you know why you do what you do?

If you know the answers it might just help when things go off course and you are at your next crossroads or feel like a hamster on a wheel.