How are you feeling?

As we’ve all experienced, our emotions can change from day to day, week to week. Sometimes second to second! Our emotions are affected by all sorts of things, and one of those is exercise.

How we feel about exercise, both before, during and after is really interesting! You’ll probably notice how you feel changes throughout the day. Also you’ve probably experienced how exercise can change how you feel too!

Even coaches don't want to workout sometimes

While it’s easy to say, do a workout and you’ll feel better - that apathy, demotivation and full blown “I can’t be bothered” is very real. We all feel like this at times. Even coaches. Yes, we may smile on camera when filming a workout, sound super motivated when we’re coaching but sometimes we too really don’t want to workout, or get in such a funk that we quit workouts.

Use this strategy to understand your emotions

One powerful way you can understand how your emotions and exercise affect each other is a simple mindfulness log - for a day, take 2 minutes to jot down how you feel at each of the points listed in the below table.

You can use this worksheet to note down, doodle, draw pictures, or even use emojis to track how you feel in relation to your exercise.

The last time I did this, I discovered that if I thought about doing a workout upon waking up, 9 times out of 10, I really didn’t want to. But asking myself that question again mid-morning after I’d had some breakfast and I’d had a shower, more often that not I was quite motivated to workout

How to get past low motivation and workout

And as we all know, AFTER a workout, I felt really good, energised and really pleased I did it. Yet committing it to paper helped me see those emotions more clearly and the following day when I felt demotivated and didn’t want to workout, seeing those notes on a sheet of paper helped me through that period and got me started on my workout.

But that’s just me! We’re all different, and we all respond differently. Yet we can all benefit from taking a few minutes to be mindful, log how we feel and see how it helps us understand our emotions and exercise.

I found it really useful, I hope you do too!