November 11, 2015

Bust Out Of Your Slump

You’re gonna hit a slump. It happens to every one of us at some point. And when it does, it tends to snowball. Maybe three weeks of straight rain and no sun got the best of you. You miss a workout, then two. Who can blame you? Getting up at the crack of dawn when it’s cold, dark and raining just sucks. Then you miss a few more. Before you realize what’s happening, your fitness routine isn’t as much a “routine” as a series of excuses.

Maybe work’s keeping you busy. Long hours and lots of stress will take a toll on anyone’s priorities. Maybe something else is throwing you off your routine like a new baby, an injury, or moving to a new city.

Or maybe you’ve stuck with your routine. You go to the gym or fitness class on time every day. You follow the plan. You do the exercises you’re supposed to do. But maybe you’ve hit a plateau. Or worse, you’re regressing. And now it’s getting harder and harder to stay excited about your workouts.

It doesn’t matter what’s causing it, a slump is a slump and it happens to all of us.

But here’s the good news: That slump is almost entirely in your head.

Missing a workout doesn’t make you weak. Getting off your routine won’t make you lose all your progress. Falling short of expectations in a workout doesn’t make you a failure.

You’ve just got to get out of the slump. You’ve got to get out of your own head. And I’ll tell you how.

Here is your guaranteed, 100% money back, fool-proof, one-step-plan to busting out of your slump:

Go Do Something Hard.

That’s it. You wanna break out of your slump? Get up and do something hard.

There are numerous studies on why exercise makes you feel better, but that’s not the point. This is an opportunity to show yourself what you’re made of. This is your chance to prove to yourself that YOU CAN DO HARD THINGS.

If you need a suggestion, here are three options:

If time is an issue but you need to get back on track, first thing after you wake up or last thing before you go to bed, do 10 min of burpees. If you don’t think that sounds hard, you’ve never done 10 minutes of burpees. You don’t even have to count reps. You just have to keep moving. You can spare 10 min. You can do something hard.

If you like running and want to bust out of that slump, pick a distance that sounds ridiculous and get on it. Know you can run 3 miles? Then go do 10. Don’t set a timer; don’t even shoot for a certain pace. Just get out there and finish it. Run it. Jog it. Walk it. Crawl it if you have to. Just finish the damn thing. Prove it to yourself what you’re made of.

My personal favorite slump buster is to go out and do a 1,000 rep workout. 10 exercises, 10 sets, 10 reps each. I don’t watch the clock; I don’t try to beat a score. I just put my head down and grind, one rep at a time. Every movement is one step out of the slump; every rep is a reminder that I do hard things.

And at the end of that 10 minutes of burpee hell or that ridiculously long run or that thousand rep grinder, like a phoenix rising out of a damn heap of sweat and pain, you emerge – a badass, fire-breathing, mountain conquering machine.

Slump? Hell nah.

Go do something hard.

Kevin Snodgrass

NASM - CPT CES