Take control of your body – Take control of your life!

Phil and I do talks around the country on the general theme of “Take control of your body – Take control of your life.” The link between exercise and a better life is well proven.  From beating back depression, to living longer and to just plain living a happier more fulfilled life can all come from just 30 minutes of exercise a day. We’re not talking about hard-core, Navy SEAL training like Phil and I endured. The positive elements of exercise can be enjoyed just by putting one foot in front of the other.

If exercise is so good for you, and it’s not that hard to do or take that long to do, then why don’t more folks do it?! In a word: habit. Understanding your habits and knowing what habits are working in your favor and which ones are holding you back, can be your key, quite literally to a better life. But before you can set a course for a habit that can put you on a happier path, you need to understand what a habit it is, how habits work and how they control most of what you do in life. It’s a pretty simple concept actually: habits are nothing more than a collection of simple actions that form a more complicated routine of actions. In SEAL Team, a classic habit that they taught us was the “how-to-shoot-a-gun” habit. The instructors would constantly remind us that they could teach a monkey to shoot a gun if it understood English! Here’s their secret training recipe: they broke the habit into tiny bite size actions – site alignment, then trigger control, then breathing and finally surprise. We spent hours and hours dry firing a gun until they felt we had mastered the basics of this habit….and a few thousand rounds later we had it relatively mastered.

The habit of exercise is not nearly as tedious as learning how to shoot a gun Navy SEAL style, but it is the same principle. My habit for exercise goes like this:

·         Understand why I want to exercise -  Makes me feel good/gives me energy and I hate my fat pants

·         Decide when I want to exercise and determine what exercise I can do that day and execute.  I literally decide 24 hours before on what and when. I find that working out first thing in the morning leaves me with the smallest chance of procrastinating and if I exercise in the evening I’m too amped up to go to sleep. (I’m not alone, several studies have proven this same thing – those that work out first thing in the morning have the highest success rate.)

 Now, I’m not asking you to form a habit overnight on committing to 30 minutes of exercise a day, but I am asking to you to try it in bite size chunks. Literally the only thing you have to lose is weight. Besides, consider your options: Don’t exercise and suffer the consequences of a shorter, unhappy life or form an exercise habit you can live with so you can live better and longer!

I know the option I’m choosing!

Set that clock ten minutes earlier tomorrow and knock out 20 pushups – one at a time, standing between each one. Can’t do a pushup – no problem – drop to your knees and knock them out one at a time.

Make life great,

Alden