Mental Strength

If you want muscles, strength, and endurance you must workout. You must work the muscles frequently and for a set period of time if you want the body to take shape. You may not be able to see the muscle or fitness if it's overshadowed by too much fat, but the muscle will grow and will be seen once the fat is lost. Even if you cannot see your efforts, you can breath, climb, and move easier than when you don't workout at all. Depending on how hard you workout and how long you workout your body can achieve amazing results. Those results may be long lasting or short lived, and will be determined by your mental state of mind. 

Mental Strength is not developed in the same way as physical strength.

Running yourself ragged into the ground with a million errands, chores, and the endless shitload of responsibilities for family, friends, and colleagues makes the body fatigued. If the body is tired it will not have enough energy to endure consistency or focus. It will also be too exhausted to make good nutritional choices. 

At this pace, a person may last a short period of time being able to achieve all these tasks and still be able to eat well and workout regularly, but it will end in one way or another. 
Either the body will continue on this road and develop some obsessive compulsive traits, a short temper, or other mental deficiency, or the body will shut down and stop all this crazy making activity. You may end up feeling sabotaged by your efforts achieving only failure -perhaps once more. 

Many will think that the failure came from not knowing which exercises to do, how long to exercise, or what to eat or perhaps a complete loss on how to achieve any of this at all. Most will seek external confirmation by going to a weight loss clinic of some sort,  or seek advise from a friend who said the results came by way of what you already knew and did, but somehow everything got confused in your mind, and that confusion ended up in frustration or depression and failure. 

Realize that the body is not designed to take that much stress if you don't know how to manage it all. People who are able to take on a vast amount of work and be accomplished are not made overnight. They have been trained well over time from when they were a child or they eventually got the magic key later on in life of how to do it all, but have been well practiced, that it seemed to everybody else, that it came naturally. 

Mental strength is gathered from the calm, the quiet, and the peace purposely carved out of each day. If the day is full of running around and being bothered by one person or another, there has to be a purposeful attempt to shut it all down, so that you may gather the strength you need to endure the demands a sound nutrition and exercise program will require. 

...This topic is loaded with so much to say that I will continue on another day.


"When all else fails, do nothing"

RsmKettleGirl

Unexpected Changes

It's a wonderful feeling when things are going well. The nutrition and exercise and goals are being met. Then suddenly something happens in life that feels like everything has been turned upside down. In the past, being thrown for a loop could throw me off track with my nutrition and exercise. This time I was shaken up quite a bit, but not thrown off track. My commitment is strong and the rewards seem to outweigh the potential losses I would incur.

Now I'll tell you what has been going on for the past 10 days. My 7 year old daughter is on a gymnastics team. This summer the gymnastics workouts take up quite a bit of time, but we haven't had school, and we've had a pretty low key summer otherwise.

School is starting September 13th and the gymnastics facility wants to increase the hours another 2.5 per week. She gets out of school at 2:35pm and is supposed to start gymnastics at 3pm. She wouldn't finish until 6:30pm. Just the thought of her coming home around 6:45pm only to have dinner, do homework, shower, read, and then fall asleep all by 8:30pm 3 days during the week was a nightmare thinking about how impossible this routine would be.

As a parent, I want to support my daughter's desire to compete,  but down deep I knew this type of schedule would not work for anyone in the house. The other thought going through my mind was that for the past year I have been looking forward to school starting, because both children would be at the same school and I would have a glorious 3 hours to myself to do whatever I wanted. Finally a break I deserved and wanted.

To make a long story short, I knew some moms who home schooled their children and at one time I thought about it. Now I have revisited this thought, did my homework, interviewed the home school program, visited the home school facility, and have been thinking and thinking and thinking.

I am now 90%+ sure that I will home school both children. I never really thought I would do something like this, but for whatever it's worth I think it's the best decision. first and foremost it is vital that my older child has some time to think, relax, and not feel so busy all the time, and the new schedule was truly not going to give this child "time" that she needed to just "be." The kicker is that she wants to be home schooled!

I thought I was going to have a peaceful two months to just focus on kettlebell, cardio, and weight training, and everything was going to be about me...now it looks like I will probably do kettlebell while the girls are doing homework in the same room.

Needless to say, life is certainly not boring!
Just when we think things are going as planned and expected, there is always something that comes up to shake and rattle the status quo. But don't let it take you off course! It won't help things anyway.

One can never say "life is boring."
(...and yes I'm scared and nervous, but that's okay)

RSMKettleGirl
http://bikinicompetitor.blogspot.com
rsmkettlegirl@gmail.com