WHO'S WORLD OF FANTASY WILL YOU DIVE INTO NEXT?

HOW ABOUT WE BEGIN with a story this time round? I have heard it said that stories are loved by all, regardless of age. Speaking of stories, last year around November during the Outdoor Education trip we take as Physical Education students, I remember listening to one of my friends narrate a story from her community (Luo), and boy did it sound amazing when she sang in the language – even though I couldn’t understand what was being said, hehe.

Now, before we get into the story, I would like to imagine that you have a certain image of yourself as far as fitness is concerned. Yes, I have set the setting (wordplay much?). Would I be right in suggesting that you can imagine yourself being a lot more confident in your skin; with a healthier serving of self-esteem; a more agile body than you have right now; the ability to avoid injuries at all costs due to stronger muscles, a toned body, and sturdier joints…is this something you are able to imagine? Are you able to picture yourself standing in front of the mirror, say 7 weeks or even 2 years from now, and seeing these goals in your mind?

What if you are currently recovering from an injury, say from a fall or an exercise-related activity or perhaps even from an accident at some point in the past, would I be right in saying that you do look in the mirror and wonder how it would be if you managed to attain 100% recovery? Do you ever imagine yourself back to full functionality without the inconvenience of pain and regular hospital visits? Do you ever think how much more friendlier to your pocket it would be if you could actually stop needing to go to the hospital for check-ups and medication?

Final scenario: perhaps you’ve managed to live life generally well…until the pains began. That knee pain that stopped you from going out on your daily jogs that you always looked forward to; or mayhaps even that lower-back pain that has drastically limited the scope of your activities, prohibiting you from lifting certain loads, or standing for too long, or…; and the only remedy to all this so far has been pain-relief medication, which though it may be working, is not doing a lot of good to your wallet. Wouldn’t you agree that it would be a whole lot easier to deal with these once and for all, and drastically change your life in the process?

Alright, story time.

Once upon a time, there lived a lion….

Ha, that would be quite the story if we were sitting around the fireplace.

For our story, today, I would like you to assume the role of the main character. I’d also like you to imagine yourself, in your current profession, handling lots of data or paperwork in a certain office space. Well, if you do already have an online way of keeping your paperwork, then you can imagine yourself in your kitchen with all the utensils and other cutlery found within.

One day, as you are going about your day and duties, a random tornado blows through the room and disorients everything – literally! The papers are strewn all over the floor, the cupboards have been flung open and the entire place is a mess. First thing you’d possibly do is curse your fate using one of the many cuss words you know (hehe), then later resort to tiding up, or getting someone else to do it. But since we are, for the purposes of this story, persons who value the work of our own hands and can’t stand the thought of other people arranging our private quarters, we resolve to clean up the mess ourselves.

Awesome. Everything’s back in its place, and you go to bed happy – or at least, relatively so.

An entire week goes by without any signs of another tornado, and you relax. In fact, you relax so much that you lay it off as a one-off event. Well, that is until it decides to hit again randomly the following week on the exact same day. Needless to say that the results will be the same, and there’s a high likelihood that the day will end as it did the day before. In this scenario, we’re going to imagine that the tornado hits once every week like clockwork on a certain day of the week. Which day would you prefer, Monday?

Change scene, and now imagine that the first tornado hit on a Monday, and the day ended as we have already described previously. If the tornado hit on a Wednesday the same week, the damage would be similar to what you experienced on Monday, and the same would be true if it also hit on Friday, right? In all these cases, we are imagining that we manage to get up, dust ourselves off (after a few choice cuss words to boot) and only head to bed once the place is back to its former neatness.

Enter week 2, and the tornado strikes again on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Wouldn’t you agree with me that this would begin to look like a pattern, and that because you are getting tired of having to clean up every time, you would try to look for a lasting solution that keeps your private space in order? I would be willing to bet that innovation would be the order of the day, and you’d find a way to keep the utensils in their shelves (perhaps by building a sturdier cabinet), or place your paperwork in a tornado-proof state-of-the-art filing cabinet, and so on.

The need for change would be enough to initiate measures that would protect your data and equipment, something that a weekly tornado would be unable to accomplish. Why? Well, because we tend to be a bunch of lazy people who will put things off if they aren’t that urgent (I am guilty until proven innocent). We would probably keep promising to change things only to find ourselves distracted and hit by the same tornado every time as if it’s the first time each week.

End of story.

Dear reader, that is exactly how your body adapts to exercise, and also why those who jump into it at the beginning of the year for like a week are never seen in the gym again until the first week of the following year.

The exercise you put your body through is like a tornado confined within your private quarters, and it has the nasty tendency of putting your system into all sorts of hurt, especially if you are trying it out for the very first time. Interestingly, your body tends to adapt to exercise (grow the muscles, make you stronger, faster, etc) during rest and not during the workout.

Think of it like a car’s tyres: when the car is in motion, the wheels undergo wear and tear, much like our muscles as we work out. Ideally, if the car were able to heal itself – which by the way, spoiler alert, it can’t – it would do so during the night when you parked it in your driveway. Guess what can heal itself and become even better the more we use it? I’ll give you 3 guesses, and the first 2 don’t count. The greatest asset you have: your body.

If you are the type of person who works out only once a week and are busy wondering how come there are no changes or visible signs of adaptation, it’s simply because your body has decided to take on your role in the story and keep procrastinating getting things better and tornado-prepared. There is no urgency in your body systems to change how things are, and that is why even exercising becomes harder each time yet you’ve been at it for a couple of months. Surely, it should get easier with time, right? Well, not in this model.

Compare that to someone who works out three days a week – for purposes of this article, this is a person who has started exercising very recently, or is considering to begin – their body systems will definitely not be on the same level in the same couple of months. In this case, the body takes on the role of the character in your story who ends up innovating and coming up with ways to beat the effects of the tornado, which then places them in a better spot to handle even bigger tornadoes…maybe even hurricanes and tsunamis.

Since we are here, I’ll tell you something about myself from a professional standpoint. I find exercising to “maintain fitness” really boring. It’s like playing a game ‘not to lose’ instead of playing ‘to win’. There’s a huge difference in both those statements, and I always push my athletes and clients to aim for flair: exercising to gain and reinforce their fitness levels. My objective as your instructor is not just to ensure you have a nice, enjoyable pool workout session; rather, that a carry-over effect occurs into your daily life.

Exercise has been shown to increase and enhance brain growth and create new pathways, which serve to make you smarter and retain more information, thereby increasing your productivity at work. Again, the levels of your self-esteem and confidence boost themselves to whole new levels, and wouldn’t you agree with me that you’d be super happy to look back at yourself five years from now and be happy that you made the choice to commit to my aquafitness program?

I mean, the very fact that you’ve gotten this far is proof that you are someone who is big on commitment, and by this time, I have already eliminated those not willing to go the distance. Not everyone has the mindset or discipline to commit to things, and you are someone I commend very much for being one of the very few.

You know what? As an incentive, and because you’ve shown that you are someone who cares about leveling up, you can contact/WhatsApp me here to find out what exactly I have in store for you. I’ll tell you for a fact that if you do decide to commit to this program, I will push you not because the sessions are hard, rather, because I know you are up to the challenge, even if you do not believe it yet.

So, shall we get started?