Mental or Physical?

Gosh, I’m slacking on my posts again!  I didn’t weigh in last week, I wasn’t happy with my daily weigh ins so I didn’t bother with an official weigh in.  It was that time of the month and the scale hated me!  Hoping for a nicer scale this Thursday.

There has been one thing on my mind the last 2 weeks, and I keep creating this post in my head but then never actually sit down and write it.  How much do you think exercise is mental vs physical?

I know you are probably thinking “Well it’s all physical, duh!  You are physically doing something, you aren’t reading or thinking”  Well, I think that’s wrong!  he he  I think it’s more mental than physical.  I really think my body can handle a lot more physically than I make it do, but my mind holds me back.

Last fall I was jogging for 10 minutes at a time without walking, I would walk for a couple minutes and then jog for another 8 minutes.  I was doing it and I was 20 pounds heavier than I am now.  I always had the thought of, “I can’t wait until I lose some weight because then this will feel a little easier”  I still have that thought!

I’ve been doing a training program that my app edmondo made for me.
I do it 3 days a week, day 1 is: run 1 min, recover 30 seconds – 6 times, then run 30 seconds and recover one minute – 8 times.
Day 2 is: run 1 minute, recover 1 minute – 10 times
Day 3 is: run 2 minutes, recover 1 minute – 7 times

The first 3 weeks the plan is the same, except in the 3rd week it has me do a fitness test where I have to run for 12 minutes, and then it will adjust my plan based on how my performance is.

Day 1 and day 2 is a piece of cake.  I love it, it’s challenging, but I can finish it and I feel great about it.  Day 3…. I started out strong.  I felt great.  The first three 2 minute running intervals went pretty fast, and I felt like I killed them and I was going to kill that work out!  Then came interval 4, that last minute felt like the longest minute ever.  Then interval 5, OMG how could two minutes take so long?  Then interval 6…. ugh, I can’t make the whole 2 minutes, I ended up walking about the last 15 seconds of it.  Then I finished “strong” on interval 7 and forced myself to run the whole thing, even though I was starting to think I should check the app and make sure it was still working and the timer wasn’t broken.

As I was doing my cool down walk I started this post in my head.  I could physically handle running probably 20 minutes straight, but why won’t my mind let me do it?  How do I get out of my head long enough to let myself accomplish what I want physically?

After that day, I didn’t really run for a whole week.  Yesterday was my first day back to running and I started on Day 1 again, and yes I killed it.  It was easy.  Todays plan was a warm up walk with a little high intensity intervals (HIIT) and then a kettlebell routine.  I chose a HIIT program that is only 4:10 minutes long and it’s supposed to be 20 seconds high intensity alternating with 10 seconds of low intensity.  Well, again I “can’t” sprint for 20 seconds eight times, so I’m starting out with sprinting on the 10 second intervals and recovering on the 20 second intervals.  I completed it and then thought I would try it one more time before I got back home, I did two more sprints and gave up.  My shins started hurting.  But I’m still proud of myself, it may have only been 1:30 minutes of sprinting, but even 2 weeks ago my mind was convinced that I couldn’t sprint.  I wanted to start doing HIIT, but there was no way I could sprint so it wasn’t happening.  Guess what…. I’m doing it though!