The one training I was missing, and you could be missing too

orenshani7

It all started few months ago, and oddly enough, with an argument with my mother. Don't be afraid, I am not going to bore (or intimidate) you with a mother and son relationship story, but in order to understand what follows, you need to know this about my mother: She is a stoicism role model. I mean, her stoic attitude to life is how she survived the death of my father and 3 cases of violent cancer. It's true. She is the strongest person I know. Except to when it comes to emotional situations and mostly to her relationships with us, her children.

So finally, after wanting to do it for quite a while, I found the courage to talk to her about that. I asked her, “How come you never give up on anything, except for on us?”

Did it make a difference as far as things go between her and myself, and my siblings? Well surprisingly it did. I am not going to get into this with you, but the important thing for this discussion is, that it made a big difference for me, as far as my fitness is concerned.

At that point I was going to the gym regularly for three years. My fitness was improving quite nicely in all aspects. I was losing fat and gaining muscle, my cardiovascular stamina, and my blood fat numbers (which were my main concerns because of how my father died) were “fine”. But I wasn't happy. I felt like something was holding me back. I knew I could improve much further and much faster.

I am 53 years old, so I could use this as an excuse, telling myself that it is not realistic to expect fast progress, “in my age”. But I knew this was not it. I knew that what was holding me back at the gym was the same thing that was holding me back in other aspects of my life, and that was that I was just like my my mother. When it came to dealing with emotional situations, and especially with unpleasant emotions, I always started to struggle and stutter. And then I realised it. I was simply lacking emotional fitness. I mean, isn't our brain just like a muscle? I always thought so when it came to intelligence and intellect, so why would emotions be different? What if my emotional stamina could be built through training, just like my muscles? What if it could be done exactly by the same principles as physical training? Principles like time under tension and deliberate inducement of controlled fatigue?

Do you know how when you're buying a new car, all of the sudden you see many more cars of the same model on the the road? Well the same happened to me with this “emotional training” idea. All of the sudden I started encountering online articles and several TED talks that went along the same line of thought. So I decided to give it a chance and try to implement this idea in practice. Instead of running away from situations that involved unpleasant emotions, I started looking at them as training opportunities. Instead of taking the easy way out by giving up or by becoming aggressive, I started standing my ground more and put more focus on getting positive results out of these situations. And it worked! It worked in many aspects of my life, and not surprisingly, in the fitness aspect too. Now I was able to get a better grip on my nutrition, and challenge myself with higher intensity training methods. In few months I transformed my body completely. I lost 6 kilograms (after losing about 5 on my former 3 years of training) my blood fat results now are not just “fine”, they are excellent. I am more fit and feel better than I ever did, even than when I was much younger.

So my point for you in all this story is that maybe “emotional training” is the one training that you miss too. There is a tendency in the Western culture, to overlook emotions, to treat them as something that we should transcend above. But this is not true. Emotions are extremely important, and should be cultivated and strengthened, not suppressed or ignored.

So give it a try. If you are already accustomed to training your body, it shouldn't be to hard for you to make the proper analogies. You will see results. I am quite convinced.