January 19, 2016

The Dumb Habit That Messed Up My Workouts

This week on Classpass, I was really excited when a class opened up at Bodybar. Bodybar normally costs $45 per class! (Yes, you read that right; no, it’s not a private session.) Bodybar’s classes are so expensive that DailyBurn profiled them in a roundup of the priciest fitness classes worth the splurge. They are a really awesome workout, more so than any other pilates class I’ve taken; however, I just can’t justify spending that kind of money on one workout.

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At least Bodybar has fancy machines that make me feel like I’m (kind of) getting my money’s worth?

Bodybar is one of those exclusive studios that is on Classpass but doesn’t make a lot of pre-work or post-work classes available – just the low-traffic classes in the middle of the day when I can’t go. So when the 5:15am slot opened up this morning, I jumped right on it. $45 class for a $10 price! However, the 6:00am class end time is normally when I start my workout for the day, so that threw off my morning routine a bit. I decided beforehand that I would use some of that extra time to hit the treadmill at the hotel gym before showering and heading off to work early.

I normally watch TV while I’m doing cardio, and today was no exception. However, I usually time my workout to be a full episode of whatever I’m watching. (Today, that was The Good Wife.) As luck would have it, on Friday morning I didn’t completely finish watching an episode, thanks to technical difficulties, so today I had just thirteen minutes left of that one. But I had plenty of time and I wanted to run longer. So I watched the last thirteen minutes of episode 5, and then watched the first fifteen minutes of episode 6 – at which point I had done 3.5 miles and was about ready to be done, so I saved the rest of that episode for later. Obvious solution, right?

Except it wasn’t all that obvious to me. Turns out that I’m completely stuck in my habit of watching a whole show or not watching anything at all. I realized this morning that that dumb habit has kept me from exercising sometimes when I did have the energy or time to spare. I got so used to the idea of always finishing an episode that I let my TV watching dictate my workouts. Um, that’s not how it’s supposed to go!

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It’s not supposed to go like this either! I try to avoid ever vegging out and watching TV, and instead save my favorite shows as a reward to distract myself when I’m doing cardio. It really does help me run faster without paying attention to the numbers and psyching myself out!

So tonight, I need to grab dinner and do some work at the hotel… but I also know that I’ll have at least ten minutes to spare. Maybe that’s not long enough to finish episode 6 of the Good Wife, but it’s definitely long enough to get in another mile, or maybe even a mile and a half if I’m feeling particularly speedy and can spare another two minutes. (Truth: I can almost always spare another two minutes.) #WYCWYC

I’m hoping that by simply noticing this dumb little habit and paying attention to it, I can change it pretty easily. Sometimes it’s not so much that you need to make a big drastic change to move forward; you just need to fix the little things that are holding you back from progress.

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