How to Exercise Consistently

Welcome! If you’re not listening or watching, scroll below the YouTube video to read how I exercise consistently.

LINKS MENTIONED HERE IN EPISODE 8:

// Revelation Wellness
www.revelationwellness.org

The book, The Wellness Revelation
https://amzn.to/36BjW5m

// My standing desk / stationary bike, $15 off
http://flexispot.refr.cc/sholmberg88

Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/samholmberg)

What works for me to exercise consistently or have a drive or self discipline that I never had before? Let me tell you. Hopefully you can apply it to your own life.

I definitely struggle with consistently exercising and I think that it is common.

When I was a kid and growing up, I never thought that I was athletic at all. I knew that I thought my father was athletic and so somehow within me I had that ability to become athletic. But when I was a kid, I wasn't allowed to play contact sports to protect my eyes. So that made me really unfamiliar with certain sports and gave me a ton of sports anxiety. I wanted to play but I didn't know how or had never practiced. And I just loved to stay inside and do things like draw; that took out a lot of the time that kids might spend with hand eye coordination - you know, throwing balls and playing playing sports that they do with with teams and so. It took me a really long time to discover my ability for my physical body to achieve some tough stuff.

There’s a lot of research and science around our culture and what people think about their bodies, men and women, boys and girls, all humans experience a lot of insecurity in America around what they should look like.

And that's not what this episode is really about. What it is about is getting past the pressure of looking a certain way and finding health and finding what works for you in being healthy and taking care of your body. So whatever body you have when you take care of your body is exactly what it's supposed to be. When you don't take care of your body, you feel sick or yucky or bloated or in pain or plenty of other symptoms.

You know that exercise is something that helps not only in feeling good, but also reducing anxiety and stress, increasing the amount of sleep that we get and just having a general, more healthy, calm life. And yet we don't do it. So it's like the biggest prescribed fix to our symptoms would be exercise. I'm not trying to tell anybody what to do. I think that we all know as adults that exercise is the best way to take care of our bodies.

So when I got older I had to start to seek out exercise for myself. I wasn't on a sports team swim team anymore Eventually I discovered the BBG by Kayla Itsines. She has the Sweat app. You might be familiar with it and it has a lot of other fitness instructors in different programs rather than the BBG that you can try. I absolutely love it and the first time I did it I got to week nine I believe. So the original BBG was 12 weeks long and I was not able to finish it because. I quit and my life got really busy at that time. So I I found excuses to not keep going with the program. Anyways, I found a friend at my job who wanted to do the BBG for the first time, so we became little workout partners. and I got to week seven or eight or nine, again, and quit again! It was really frustrating and I never really thought about my motivation to do it. It's just something I thought I should do, and I found that I really enjoyed hiit more than I enjoyed other things in the past.

So I thought this is the answer. This is the program I should be doing, but for some reason I still couldn't stick with it.

Fast forward a couple of years and my friend, Bri, introduced me to Revelation Wellness and their workout podcast. In general, the concept is that you move your body while you listen to the podcast. You can be cleaning your house, taking a walk, biking. Sometimes it's interval training.

These are biblically based so [the host, Alisa Keeton] might tell a story from the Bible or talk about the meaning of a certain scripture and have you focus on it and think about it every time.

It's positive it's about love. It's about acceptance. It's about how special and important you are and this is mixed with science. She has done tons of research on exercise science…

While you're exercising, your body is creating three times more brain cells than when it's not exercising and so it's the perfect time to infuse your thoughts - and you might even say these things out loud - with positive messages about yourself, so you’re reframing your brain while you're working out and working out is already a positive experience.

But when you add in positive messaging about love and acceptance and support and capability and being made, created to be a special being with purpose, these messages are going to be stored in your body as you're exercising and they're more likely to stick around. So, you heal yourself. You learn a lot. You feel better and you feel better because of the chemicals released as you exercise and because of the positive messaging that's going on in your head. It basically multiplies the benefits consistently.

This is what got me to consistently workout. Because I cannot keep doing things that feel shallow or surface level; it has to be deeper for me and probably for you, too, you know if you're here and you're listening to a self-improvement podcast. Deep, interesting concepts and learning is important to you.

09:01

Revelation Wellness worked for me because I could learn things that are important to me. My spirituality is really important to me and God is really important to me, and maybe not to you; but in general, when you can think about something deeper or learn something while you exercise and you see that it will positively impact your brain and your body, and potentially heal the trauma that's stored in your body, why wouldn't you try?

So, I was into this concept and the way that it made me feel, and the way that it made me want to continue exercising when I could never get myself to continue exercising before. That's why it became the winning formula for me.

I even decided to become a Revelation Wellness instructor which teaches you through ACE to become a fitness class instructor.

It's a real struggle to figure out what's going to keep you consistent and where to find self discipline. You know how people say the phrase? “Find your why.” Well this is this is my ‘why’. My ‘why’ is deeper than “I want to be healthy.” I couldn't even get my ‘why’ to be “I don't want to have headaches anymore.”

Teaching myself to love my body and see myself as important and loved and special - that message is definitely my ‘why’. Once I feel that way, and I know that I'm special and important and loved, just like you are, I can be my best self and I can love others 'cause it's really a distraction when you're not well, when you're not healthy. The pain, the headaches, the aches, the crappy feelings, the overeating where you feel sick - those things are distractions from you being your best self and from you treating others the best way that you can.

11:00

And so when you are healthy, you can treat others the best way that you can and you can show them that this is possible for them too.

@smartveghead