How many of you approach your physical training as a little bit of a metaphor for the rest of your life? You know what I mean? You train because you want to see what you’re capable of, or you train so you know that you can endure things, or you train…whatever?
How many of you train just because you love the feeling of moving? That’s a lot of you, that actually confuses the hell out of most of your clients. They don’t understand that, and that’s tough.
Remember, you got into this business because you like it, a lot of times, we’re actually dealing with people who don’t. How many of you find your stamina taxed, on a daily basis working with clients? Yeah? Again, this is … I’ve been pacing around like a caged animal trying to decide how deep to go right away.
We’re just going to dive in, all right? You don’t have to raise your hand if you don’t want to, but how many of you have actually considered leaving this profession because you find working with people so exhausting? I see a lot of hands going up and a lot people nodding their head.
One of the things I’ve found over the course of looking at the health and fitness industry, the health care industry, is that most people go into health and fitness and healthcare because they like helping people. At some point, a lot of people burn out in the helping professions because they find it exhausting to care so much. Correct?
Stamina is an interesting class. We’re going to look at it in a lot of different ways. We’re going to approach stamina from a physical prospective, we’re going to do a lot of breathing work, we’re going to look at how pain influences us. One of the things I’m hoping and if you want to write something down out of this first hour, probably the thing you that you want to write down to remember is that your experiences of pain and fatigue are a habit.
That is the first thing that I want you to understand.
As it comes through, as we start looking and digging into the research, one of the things that’s most interesting to me, is that people quit doing anything or everything because they have habituated themselves into quitting at that time.
One of the most interesting pieces of research when it comes to the respiratory system, is if you take someone you do to them what Sam was describing that he did to himself. You put them on a cycle orgometer and you actually have them pedal to absolute exhaustion.
I’m not talking about pedaling for hours, I’m saying a high intensity cycling exercise, I want you to pedal to absolute exhaustion and were looking at your lungs. Whenever people feel completely breathless, does everyone understand that you’re not completely breathless? Right? There’s still air available.
The problem is that we have these reflexes set in place, and we develop them over time.
This comes down to not just your experiences of pain but your experiences of breathlessness, etc. We’re going to play around with a lot of that.
I hope that what you will leave this class with is an understanding of what your habitual barriers are and a lot of tools to go if this is my habitual quitting spot, are there ways that I can not quit just then?
Does that make sense? That is really to me one of the most interesting pieces of all of this.
