Exercise: Escape Your Mental Traps From The Past

By Winston Salem in : Fitness Tips // Dec 23 2008

Have you heard people talk like this?
- I’m just not the kind of person who exercises.
- I’m basically a lazy person.
- I didn’t come from a family that played sports.
- I’ve always been overweight.
- I don’t have any discipline.

Do you ever say these kinds of things about yourself? If so, you are caught in at least one mental trap from the past.

Mental traps are habits of thinking or habitual ways of seeing yourself based on your past experience. Some of them you created all by yourself.

Mental traps can also come from what other people have said to you about you. You lazy girl. Get up and clean your room.

Mental traps can come from your loyalty to a group, like your family or your culture. A real lady never sweats! My family didn’t play sports.

Any of these mental traps can easily sabotage your fitness program, because self-image drives a lot of your default or automatic behavior.

Mental traps are like an outdated default setting on your fitness program. Every time you exercise, you have to change the setting. You can do it deliberately with effort, but it is just one more step, one more barrier to overcome, before you can exercise. You don’t need it!

Get rid of your mental traps from the past today to make it easier to exercise. Listen to what you say to yourself. Listen to what you think about yourself. Pay attention to how you see yourself. This is the first step: you must identify the mental trap.

Enlist the help of a good friend or helpful family member to point out what you say about exercise and fitness. This is especially useful if you are having difficulty listening to yourself or seeing what your self-image is. In order to begin to make changes you must identify the mental trap.

Get rid of your mental traps from the past. Write the new script, change the default settings and update your fitness program with a new image of yourself that reflects what you want your exercise and sports participation to be. Start off with the one-day-at-a-time philosophy. You can only make a change by taking new action today.

After a while the todays add up to an important change and the mental trap from the past has disappeared.

Later you can consider the question: how long do I have to exercise or play a sport before it becomes part of who I am?

How many times do you have to play golf, play tennis or scuba dive before you acquire a new identity as a golfer, a tennis player or a diver?

Just paying attention may be enough to make the mental change in your self-image. Oh yeah, I really am a cyclist. I bicycle several days a week. Your self-image may shift when you hear someone else observe, You really are in good shape. Do you exercise?

Change the mental trap from the past. Actively decide what self-image you want to create and do it. Do you want to see yourself as a strong person? Lift weights. Do you want to be a person who takes part in exciting activities? Train to climb mountains. Maybe you want to be adventuresome. Bicycle through Europe. Perhaps it is seeing yourself be successful day after day at your health club that over rides your old self-image of lazy.

Escape the old, comfortable, but negative, mental traps from the past. Claim your new self-image of health and fitness today. Enjoy the new you!