Believe it or not, many of the ideas that come to me, even for this newsletter, come to me unexpectedly.
They are things that catch my attention.
And from there, stories are formed.
Stories that I share with you and that I hope will serve you as much as they serve me.
Like what I’m going to tell you today.
You see, when I don’t have access to a gym, I always turn to my dear Sidney.
Sidney is my dear friend, my personal trainer, although she doesn’t know it. Of course not!
And I’ve been following her workouts since…? Wait, since… before the pandemic.
Wow.
Now we almost talk about pre-pandemic times, with a concept similar to prehistory. Before history was written.
Well, it was in pre-pandemic times that I met Sidney.
And the rest, as we say, is history.
One of the things that characterises Sidney is that at the end of the day’s workout, she exclaims, ‘You’ve made it to your cooldown!’
This indicates that the hard work is over, and it’s time to do post-workout stretches.
And right at that moment, Sidney likes to give a small motivational speech, usually focused on concepts like ‘showing up to do the work’, perseverance, consistency, achievement of goals…
A long list of concepts generally related to physical exercise and being in good physical and mental shape.
That is, health.
I don’t always connect with her speeches. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. It depends on how inspired Sidney is, or more importantly, on what her words mean to me at that moment.
But I really liked what she shared in this workout, and I want to share it with you:
“ ‘When in doubt, breathe it out.’
In fitness and in life.
If you’re thinking about quitting, breathe.
There comes a time in every single workout when everyone says, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’
‘I want to be done right here.’
Right?
Because it’s hard. And we are fighting against resistance for the whole workout.
It’s the same in life. There comes a time when it gets a little tougher because the next level demands the next level of you.
Everyone has that moment of reflection: ‘I don’t want to do this anymore. I think it’s time for me to give up.’
The people who succeed are the people who push past that feeling.
They’re not people who never experience that feeling.
They’re people who say, ‘I know this is going to come. I’ve worked hard, now it’s getting to the point where it’s tough, and it’s demanding ‘next level me’ or demanding that I just get over it, tap into my mentality, and say, ‘I feel full of energy. I feel totally motivated.’
The most successful people just say, in spite of this feeling of ‘It’s getting tough, I want to quit,’ they push past it.
It’s not that they never experience it.
Remember that every time you go home and don’t want to eat what you’ve cooked. Every time you say, ‘I didn’t drink any water today, I’m okay, I’ll just drink more coffee or energy drinks.’ No, drink water.
Push past the feeling of ‘I don’t want to because it’s getting hard,’ ‘I don’t want to because I’m tired,’ ‘I don’t want to because I’m unmotivated.’
Everyone has those feelings.
Every day.
The people who see results, see changes, see positive benefits, just experience those feelings and then say, ‘I’m going to do it anyway.’
And this, this magical pill of knowledge that Sidney shared. Let me assure you, this can be applied to everything in life.
Not just physical exercise, not just sports. If you know how to pay attention.
Sport, practiced consistently, gives you so much on a personal development level that you’ll see the benefits in many areas of your life, not just physically.
The consequences are incredibly positive.
Look, throughout my professional career, I’ve come across many people with a strong aversion to physical activity.
Perhaps they weren’t born with athletic abilities, they’re clumsy, they’re not agile or fast, or they struggle with motor coordination…
Perhaps because of that, they had a really hard time in school PE classes. Perhaps their classmates laughed at them, or even the teacher did.
Perhaps because of that, they compared themselves to others and saw how well they did in comparison to their own struggles.
For thousands of reasons.
And yet, the lessons sport teaches, beyond pure exercise and physical well-being, are some of the best things they can experience for their lives.
Sport is one of the few things that, if you do it consistently over time…
(Consistency, understood as doing something frequently, regardless of the level of excellence in practice, but doing it several times a week, for weeks, for months, for years (yes, years!). I need to explain everything!)
As I was saying,
If you do it consistently over time, regardless of your starting point, regardless of how skilled or clumsy you are, if you always ‘show up’, you’ll see results over time.
What results? Well, that will depend on what you set out to achieve.
But sport teaches lessons that go beyond the body itself.
It teaches you perseverance, the patience to wait for results to appear, even if it takes a long time.
It teaches you resilience and flexibility, the ability to overcome difficulties.
It teaches you to learn what things are within your control and will bring positive results in the long term, and what things are out of your control and you need to learn to let go of or live with.
These are just some examples of what physical exercise, integrated into your lifestyle, can give you in return.
It’s much more than the physical.
And remember, physical exercise is for everyone.
Not just those blessed by the magic wand of genetics, with prodigious athletic abilities who, if well guided, could become elite athletes. This isn’t just for them.
This is also for those who always came last in school sprint races.
For those who fall a hundred times in the same yoga pose, while others are doing upside-down poses.
For those who have the coordination of a clumsy rhinoceros on a tightrope and find it a hundred times harder to serve with a racket.
For those who take a few months longer to learn how to ride a bike than their schoolmates.
For those who are scared of heights on playground climbing frames, slides, or monkey bars and were mocked by other kids.
That was me, too, by the way.
Don’t believe me?
If it wasn’t, I’d have probably chosen Rafa Nadal’s career, but I didn’t have that genetic luck, I had another kind.
And that’s not why I stopped doing sports, regardless of how far I could go.
Because sport gave me more than the sport itself, more than the changes or well-being I could feel in my body.
Sport, for those who are consistent, can give you everything.
Love,
Noemi
P.S.: If you want to see Sidney’s video I’m talking about, it’s here (minute 40:18).
