When you can’t face a workout

It’s 6pm after work on a cold November evening.

It’s dark. It’s raining. It’s windy. It’s been a long day.

I’m sat in my car in the car park outside the gym, chilled to my bones with the heater failing to raise my temperature or make a dent in my icy demeanour.

I’m also in tears. I’m tired, weary and I can’t do it. I can’t face walking into the gym, getting changed into cold workout clothes, going through the process of warming up and then getting through my workout.

I don’t have the strength of mind or strength of body to do it. I’m lost. I’m distraught.

My whole day revolves around my training. I eat for this moment. I wish the day in the office would fly by faster so I can work out, get that endorphin high, enjoy my post workout shake, a well-earned hot shower, go home and eat food that is homecooked and good for me, content with what I have achieved.

But I can’t bring myself to do it today. What’s wrong with me? I’m a fraud. Is this the end? Am I no longer a real athlete? I can’t possibly eat a normal dinner now that I haven’t burnt the calories I would have done in a workout. What do I do with this dead time? Maybe I should just go straight to bed.

This is catastrophising to the hyperbolic extreme.

But that is where my mind used to go to when this happened. Have you ever been here before?

I share this for several reasons:

• Not wanting to train happens to all of us… all of the time.

• It still happens to me.

• But… it hasn’t happened to this extreme since a key moment in my life: real loss. A family bereavement.

Why?

Because I can dress down the value of missing a gym session. The world’s bigger than that. My fitness goal is made up of so many components, from all my other sessions, to my nutrition and my religious consistency with my food.

It’s. Just. Not. That. Important.

With all that combined, it will outweigh brief moments like this. It will be but a speck in a year of good habits and successful sessions – some that I loved, and others that I hated but got through all the same.

And once you’ve built a habit of training and eating for your goal, day in, day out, you begin to understand how your body reacts to certain situations, and that perhaps it might be your body telling you… ‘not today my friend, not today’.

To put it another way, and paraphrasing one of my favourite classic films:

‘Six days does not a week make’.

Remember that next time your enthusiasm wavers outside the gym. Not every workout is going to be a Rocky montage scene. It’s not going to feel like the sessions you watch of your favourite fitness influencer. There won’t be a soundtrack to spur you on.

But that’s ok. Life is never that way. Your workout journey is a microcosm of life: some days are good, others not so good.

My new strategy when I’m struggling to get it done?

• Walk through the doors.

• Do something – move.

• Ask yourself how it feels.

• If it’s ok, keep going.

• If not, try something else.

• If that fails to ignite your enthusiasm, leave the gym without hesitation or regret, safe in the knowledge that you tried and you did something.

You learnt about yourself that day.

With that knowledge, you can re-frame your feelings the next time it happens, if it happens, and life won’t seem so hard after all.

Now go get ‘em.

Bonus points for anyone that messages me with the name of the classic film I quoted.