There’s a sliding scale of life on which a certain tipping point resets our years to start again in September, not January. Parenthood is a failsafe trigger.
‘Hot girl summer’ was another missed headline on social media, exchanged for ‘hot mess summer’ in which I met Instagram’s idealised workouts in the sun with actual suitcase carries – five of them between two able adults, to be precise.
For six solid weeks, the closest I came to a deadlift was peeling mid-tantrum children off the floors they decidedly glued themselves too – super-suction is an underestimated super power. Is it just me, or does its agreeable inanimateness make a barbell more appealing than ever?
Then September lands like an A380 with its brakes on the brink. There’s the whiplash of a new term, overlapping extracurriculars and back-to-school bugs disrupting it all, but there’s also the hope of shoehorning your own goals in amongst it all. You approach the start, again, tinged with a touch of resentment that you took two steps back from your pre-summer progress. But what you may not realise is this is the progress that matters most.
So common is the refrain ‘consistency is king’ that it either rolls off the ear dismissively, or bounces irritatingly off the ear drum when it does penetrate. We hear a command we think we cannot deliver without constraint. We see ‘3-5 days per week’ workouts and progressive overload that never relapses. We pick up the drum stick and beat ourselves with it yet again, when there is a real opportunity to instead beat our own fucking drum, because there is no one more consistent than a parent.
No one shows up, sacrifices, reinvents and adapts more, under more fatigue and with less support, than a mum or dad does for their kids. So brushing the dust off your shoulders and shaking the creak out of your joints to start again with your training? To you, that’s child’s play.
What’s more? You’re not starting where you started last time. Consider this. Divide the year into, say, six mini-seasons of training. Each season you take three steps forward – learning new movements, up-skilling, improving your technique, healing an injury, etc. Say, on average, you take one step back with each of the mini off-seasons life mandates. One year later, you’ll still be 12 steps forward.
That’s a lot further forward than you’d be if your threw in the towel. So imagine yourself, a year from now, advanced another 12 steps in pursuing the kind of health that helps you to realise all that you are and all that you can be. About to start another season, building on all that you’ve built before.
So start. Start again. This September, and a hundred times thereafter. Super-suction is cool (not), but starting again is the real superpower.
If you want to make the next mini-season of training matter more, and learn movements and skills that will stay with you for every season thereafter, get in touch to enquire about my private personal training in Dubai. I specialise in coaching women through their own seasons of life – perinatal, menstrual and perimenopausal especially.
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