How to Persists During Exercise When It’s Hard or Boring
What do you do in the middle of your workout when it feels extremely hard or just plain boring? …when all you want to do is push the escape button? You won’t hear me rattle off a slew of clichés on positive thinking. Rather, there are two practical strategies for difficult exercise moments.
First, classify the intent of your exercise bout into one of two categories. While you are exercising, who do you most often identify with?
- Pleasant Peter: the goal of his exercise is to improve his health in a pleasant (or less unpleasant), moderately-intense session.
- Fierce Frank: the goal of his exercise is to enhance his fitness and achieve optimal performance.
You probably identify with one approach more often than the other. However, let’s recognize that people don’t always fit neatly into these two categories. Some days, your goals may align more with Peter, other days you may feel more like a Fierce Frank. Nonetheless, matching your exercise goal with the most effective attentional strategy will help optimally manage your exercise experience.
Attentional Strategies
Generally speaking:
Pleasant Peter’s benefit from dissociative strategies.
Fierce Franks benefit from associative strategies.
How to Utilize Dissociative and Associative Strategies
- Dissociation: while exercising, tune your attention outwards to the external environment. For example, instead of thinking about how you feel, focus on listening to music or a book, talking with a friend, watching TV, or observing the scenery. People who use dissociative strategies report a more pleasant exercise experience.
- Association: while exercising, focus your attention internally on signs of exertion from your body. For example, monitor body functions like heart rate, muscle tension, and breathing rate. Let me be clear, associative strategies do not make exercise more pleasant. However, they have been shown to enhance performance, which is the goal of Fierce Frank.
When to Choose Dissociation
If you are working on making exercise a habitual part of your lifestyle, research suggests that dissociative strategies and low-moderate exercise intensities are the best fit for you, because it yields a more pleasant (or less unpleasant) exercise experience. As such, when you enjoy exercise you are more likely to stick to your program.
When to Choose Association
If you want to improve your fitness and optimize your performance like Fierce Frank, associative strategies will help support those goals. Relative-fitness is achieved by doing more than you’ve done before. This can be an uncomfortable process that involves higher intensity exercise. Therefore, associative strategies help a person to self-monitor their heart rate, breathing rate, etc. in order to regulate their effort and achieve greater fitness gains.
For the Fierce Frank’s
So, if fitness is important to you, how can you manage the unpleasant experience of high intensity* exercise?
See it coming.
Accept it.
Embrace it.
Own it.
See it coming. Research is clear that “mind over muscle” strategies really don’t make exercise less unpleasant at high intensities.
Accept it. High intensity exercise is grueling whether you use associative or dissociative strategies. There’s no two ways about it.
Embrace it. Contrary to the common expression that … “it’s killing me!” The truth is that exercise makes you live. Your cardiovascular system is alive and getting stronger with every beat during exercise.
Own it. No one can make you exercise, even if they threaten you with medication, guilt, or push-ups. It is always your choice and only your choice to exercise. You own it, it’s yours.
Lastly, whether you are typically a Pleasant Peter or a Fierce Frank, I hope that you are proud of yourself for exercising regardless of the intensity. Research shows that those who exercise regularly are healthier, happier, and more productive human beings than their non-exercising counterparts.
Thanks for reading! 🙂
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*Anyone engaging in exercise, especially high-intensity exercise, should have medical clearance from their physician.
References:
Lind, E., Welch, A., & Ekkekakis, P. (2019). Do ‘Mind over Muscle’ Strategies Work? Examining the Effects of Attentional Association and Dissociation on Exertional, Affective and Physiological Responses to Exercise. Sports Medicine.
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