One thing nature teaches us is that no matter how wild the wind gusts, the eye of the storm is in our heads and moving our bodies helps us find it.
Effectively managing exercise and training in our lives helps us keep a clear head in a stressful world and stay healthy. As life’s storms swirl around us, training becomes even more important for our health and our greatest mental training opportunities kick in. Ideally, exercise and training are not isolated aspects of life but are integrated parts of effective and healthy life strategy. It’s helpful to understand and put into practice the lessons we’ve learned from the very well-studied relationship between exercise and anxiety. Even some very small steps can help us; there are ways to maintain training and exercise in the most overwhelming schedules and circumstances. In times of apparent chaos, training rigidity doesn’t generally help us but adaptability does; sometimes maintaining our training takes a bit of creativity and willingness to do some goofy things.
Ironically, it is often when it is most difficult to fit it into our lives that a bit of exercise provides us with the strongest mind clearing benefits. Collective wisdom (including over thirty years of extensive scientific study) teaches us that exercise lowers anxiety. This effect has been particularly well studied in connection with aerobic exercise but the research demonstrates that resistance training is also effective for grounding and calming ourselves. Research has also demonstrated that a single exercise session helps us with decision-making and focus so that we can be more effective in tackling life’s challenges. If we can manage the extra step of doing our exercise in nature, research and collective experience suggest that this may provide us with even more powerful health and anti-anxiety benefits.
Prioritizing training when all of our other demands or stressors start to feel particularly consuming may require a little mindset shift. First, it may help to reframe a training session as a dose of medicine rather than another obligation or stressor. Second, like all things in life, commitment to training is itself trainable. There are no better times to practice this mental skill than the times we feel overwhelmed. Third, we may need to shift some beliefs about exercise in order to have it fit better into our lives. Effective exercise sessions don’t need to be massive time consuming efforts. Particularly in the last year as I’ve been experimenting with home strength training, I’ve been doing plenty of 10-30 minute strength workouts that I sprinkle into my life throughout the week. I’ve personally found that sitting down for prolonged periods of time results in a substantial drop-off in productivity for me. When I sporadically do small strength workouts during the day it adds up and it keeps my mind focused when I want it to be. I wish I had owned a heavy sandbag back when I used to work in offices as a lawyer. I would have run it up and down the stairs every hour and I probably would have been a lot more productive in general. Even five minutes of planks and wall sits and a set or two of pushups can form an effective sweat-free workout for the purposes of developing commitment to exercise when life feels too overwhelming.
I suspect that many parents may feel challenged trying to juggle home-schooling their kids with trying to work remotely in the midst of all the coronavirus shutdowns. Although I do not share that particular challenge, perhaps the experimentation with quirky home workouts that I’ve been doing gives me a helpful window to provide a few suggestions. Given how much of my own life I’ve spent unlearning the “knowledge” that I “learned” on a long and intense academic path, I personally encourage including plenty of gym class and recess in a homeschool plan. Homeschool gym classes can be crafted to provide a great workout for the whole family. We can usually all benefit from things like jogs, sprints, bike rides, hikes, jump ropes, push-ups, pull-ups, and other calisthenics. We can also use kids as weights and do squats or other exercises with them (like picking them up and putting them down). I couldn’t find anything about this in any of my National Strength and Conditioning Association resources or any of my other training guidebooks, but my personal experience suggests that squirmy weights really develop our “stabilizer muscles.” If we are further developed athletically and working to develop our explosive power, piggy back jump squats can be great (and a lot of fun for kids).
Most importantly, we can be grateful for the training opportunity that the disruptions and stressors in our lives are giving us to find our calm in the storm and to develop our adaptability. If we can maintain our training and be creative and responsive about it while we find ourselves in a time of stress and turmoil, doing it in our “normal” lives will be easy. This same skill is actually one of the most important skills that we need and develop as athletes and explorers in nature, where we are constantly asked to deal with novel challenges.
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