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The point of the story is that no matter how strong the effort put in the wrong direction is, it will not bring the desired or planned results.

With too many unwanted results, injuries, rapid mood swings, chronic fatigue, and an emotional inability to deal with disordered interpersonal relationships, we need to honestly ask and look for answers to why we exercise or train this way.

A well-known tale talks about a master, who, during a talk with a student, picks up a brick and starts polishing it. When the student asks him what he is doing, the master replies, “I am making myself a mirror.”

The point of the story is that no matter how strong the effort put in the wrong direction is,it will not bring the desired or planned results.

Determining the correct path of our exercise

Exercise is directing time and effort to change the current state and solve a problem, fulfill a need or a wish to, for example, feel better, be better or gain more abilities that we will need to reach a certain goal. So, it is important to use the limited energy we have for exercise as efficiently as possible. Otherwise, we are losing both time and energy, which increases our lives’ inefficiency. 

However, the rise in inefficiency inevitably leads to more drastic attempts by the body to distract us from what we are doing ineffectively and prevent us from doing so.

To determine our exercise’s correct path, it’s important to know how to determine its true purpose and need. Many people exercise or train to relax, but they fail to ask themselves why they can’t relax without exercising and why they find themselves tensed up again.

Usually, this is an inefficient use of emotions to sort out the imbalances in our everyday life, which leads to the loss of belief that we can sort out things that disturbs, hinders, limits, or endangers us. The feeling of not taking care of important parts of your life leads to increased muscular tension and the activation of the sympathetic state of the autonomic nervous system.

This causes an excessive bodily response to events and relationships while limiting the ability to relax when all is well.

If such states last for a long time, it eventually becomes chronic, we get used to it and accept it as the new normal. 

The peak of this tension is then retained in the body and causes us feelings of restlessness, tension, nervousness, for which we cannot and do not know the cause. The body forces our consciousness to do something because excess energy has toxic effects on the body and makes maintaining an appropriate balance difficult.

This changes the respiratory rhythm, the number of inhales, and the ratio between inhale and exhale. At the same time, we lose the respiratory pause between exhale and inhale, even when everything is fine. Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl once said:” There is a space between need and response. And in this space, it is our strength to choose the response. And in our response lies our growth, progress, and freedom.”

Facing ourselves

The influence of the body’s state of heightened internal tension increasingly leads to the expression and direction of this energy from the body with less need and control over this or that energy – its purpose is to regulate interpersonal relationships and imbalances and allows us to deal with unpleasant relationships. Misunderstandings, prejudices, and the past – we use it to practice greater effectiveness of expressing emotions. Or to push it out of us, since we have no clue what to do with it, we have to get rid of it regardless of the negative long-term repercussions that will unavoidably appear. 

We need to ask ourselves whether exercise allows us to express ourselves better, whether it connects us more as a whole free from concealment, deception, and lies, or whether it allows us to express restraint in a way that does not provoke a response from the environment that we fear. 

Why is it easier for us to jump on a bike and relax by driving up a hill but resist investing time and energy into sorting out our relationship with our partner or child? Because we are afraid that we will learn facts about ourselves that we don’t want to hear and we won’t be able to deny them, and thus, face them? You cannot develop a healthy mind in a healthy body.  

Respect

An important role in reaching order in our system is having respect towards the system that is being managed. Respect affects the growth of orderliness, similar to yeast on the rising of the dough. Respect towards the system increases its orderliness, makes it better and more pleasurable. Respect allows for the right attitude to change, allows us not to expect unrealistic investment results.

Respect in itself leads to a better and more reasonable attitude towards the one we respect. When I still had a bike service, I remember how respectful and loving the older people were when they brought their bike, which they bought for their first salary 50 years ago. It was like new, as opposed to some modern recently purchased one that someone brought to me neglected and damaged, indicating a disrespectful attitude from the owner.

Respect and love have also been shown to affect plant growth, animals, and relationships. Respect is a kind of mysterious ingredient that makes a better life possible.

When working with athletes, this form is clearly shown and reaffirmed over and over again. In childhood, they learn that they have to give up authentic expressions of emotions if they want to maintain a relationship with and between their parents. Therefore, they constrict the body and change the breathing to reduce the impact of truth on their expression in an environment that cannot or is unable to accept this truth without a negative response to it.

Thus, they create a separation between the body and consciousness, which is becoming handier and handier in sports, when you have to constantly overcome yourself and know how to deny the body’s resistance to exaggeration and rapid progress, which does not respect the body’s real ability to grow and developed.

However, this ability is always smaller and slower than the athlete’s unrealistic expectations or surroundings. They experience the fulfillment of his unfulfilled desires and created frustrations in his progress.

Are we running away from something and are purposefully tiring ourselves out?

With too many side effects, injuries and rapid mood swings, chronic fatigue, and emotional inability to deal with disordered interpersonal relationships, we need to honestly ask ourselves and look for answers to why we exercise or train this way. Are we running away and from something, are we deliberately getting tired so that the imbalances in and around us don’t bother us because we are tired, or do we want to prove by force that they were wrong about us, even though it doesn’t matter, and why we can we regularly invest energy and time in sports, but not in what disturbs, hinders, threatens or limits us in life.

Because the truth hurts, it doesn’t mean that we have to run away from it. That is a childish reaction. And we aren’t children anymore.