Listening Instead of Pushing: Giving My Workouts Permission

I’ve been reading a book lately called Raise Your Vibration by Kyle Gray. It has 111 daily practices designed to help you get or stay connected to your spiritual self. Today’s practice focused on the thought that your body is the home of your soul. As the home of your soul, listening to your body during exercise becomes a critical skill we can all develop.

The Question of Downshifting

For me, this brings up one of the challenges I’ve had as I’ve got older. How do I effectively downshift workout intensity so that it remains effective, yet kinder and gentler to my older body?

I am very disciplined when it comes to exercise. Having been overweight for most of my early life, exercise is a means for keeping my weight in check.

I typically start my day with a workout of some kind. It’s my way of beginning my day with passion. This morning’s plan was a strength training session, followed by a short ab workout, and then a twenty-minute indoor cycle. Nothing out of the ordinary for me.

While warming up, my leg muscles were feeling fatigued from the 60-minute cycle that I did the day before. I haven’t been riding that much lately so I wasn’t surprised my legs were feeling tight. During the weights and ab portions of my workout, I kept thinking about how much I didn’t feel like cycling. But I kept telling myself, it was part of my plan for today’s workout—that I should push through it.

While finishing my abs, I thought about the concept of integrated training. Integrated training combines various exercise components to make a well-rounded training program. Components like flexibility, cardiorespiratory, balance, core, plyometrics, speed, agility, and resistance training. This was a moment which reminded me that I need to get better with my own integrated training. I typically go heavy on cardio, core and resistance training, with light focus on the other components.

Listening to Your Body During Exercise

After this morning’s heavy lifting session, I felt my body begging for me to give it an intensity break. What it needed instead was some flexibility work. So, after I did a search on my iPad for a 20-minute yoga flexibility video. I found one of my favorite YouTube yoga instructors at the top of the search results.

I lowered my body onto my mat and into the first yoga move and felt an emotional release. Over the years I have come to recognize this feeling. It’s a warm, delicate shiver followed by a quick, teary tingling of my eyes.  I think of it as confirmation from my inner being that I have arrived upon of a truth. I took this as a sign that I had done the right thing by listening to my body.

As I think about my body being the home of my soul, listening to my body take on a new perspective. Maybe strength isn’t about pushing harder anymore. Maybe it’s about listening sooner.