Fear’s Attraction and Why We Keep on Knocking on Fear’s Door

There is no other time in the gym where you feel the most uncomfortable than your first day. Seriously, a bunch of equipment you have never used before, a flock of people walking around (with your conscious telling you they are probably judging you…even though they’re not), men who have the strength of beating you in an arm wrestle with their left hand, and women who have the strength of beating you in an arm wrestle with their right. The entire situation of being in an unfamiliar environment is just so intimidating for many.

Catharsis-Based Fitness

ca·thar·sis [kuh-thahr-sis]

  

noun, plural ca·thar·ses [-seez]  

1. the purging of the emotions or relieving of emotional tensions, especially through certain kinds of art, as tragedy or music.

Sometimes we just want to take out our emotions on something, or (unfortunately) on someone. As the definition highlights, many have done it through the arts whether it may be in the form of music, paintings, film, literature, or any medium used to reflect one’s emotions.

We hear about cathartic actions all the time. From interviews done with an artist about there album release and how they passionately say (in an almost cookie cutter manner),“Poured their heart and soul into every single song and with every word spoken, it resonates an emotion that they experienced in their life”. Another example may be reading a book where the author’s words paints such a detailed image in your mind that chances are they are probably pretending the one character that is being pummeled to death is someone in the author’s real life or even painters who would paint a graphic scene which would give you an insight on their emotions or even better, from the teachings of Freud, paint a work of art with no understanding of why they are painting it until it is completed and they analyze what made them create such a piece.

Exercise can be just like this.

Motivation Can Help You So Much

Motivation really is a tricky subject. Extremely subjective, always changing, and maybe hard to achieve. This does not mean it is impossible to obtain, only to find.

Upon revealing the subject of this blog to my class, I received extremely (almost comically) minimal yet, eye-opening responses. Though I was only able to get the attention from a few people, their actions spoke louder than words. I was able to arouse their interest by simply saying, "My blog will be about making the gym an enjoyable experience". From this point on, I realized this is something people can universally relate to: Dragging their butts to the gym and doing a worthwhile routine while still wanting to go back to the gym the next day.