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.
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!
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.