In my book, Boutique Studio Blueprint, I share a personal story about when I was ten years old, and my father asked me “What do you want for your upcoming birthday?” I responded, “A pair of 10-pound dumbbells”. That purchase and gift would launch my trajectory of a lifetime of weight training and exercise. That love of resistance training is still alive and well, forty-four years later. This obviously played an influential role in what I later pursued as an occupation. I know this isn’t normal and I consider myself a bit of an outlier in that regard. I get cranky when I can’t train or have the time. I understand that many of the people I train and coach do not possess the same mindset. Exercise is considered more a task of what they must and need to do, not a passion. Somewhere along my journey I had a realization that, as a coach, if you mix in an element of fun, you can make the workout more palatable for the average user. To take a line from Mary Poppins, “Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”
The layout of a strengthening program plays a part in how it’s received. Whether lifting a kettlebell, weight stack of a machine, or bodyweight, it’s all resistance training, and it requires work. One of the reasons people are stagnant in their current program is because they aren’t challenging themselves. They are putting in the time, but to create an environment where the body must respond by making a positive adaptation or change, there has to a be a stimulus. That stimulus doesn’t have to always be more weight. It could be volume or repetitions, the type of load (example: changing from a kettlebell to a resistance band), or the complexity of the exercise. It’s that variety that can add an element of fun. There’s a reason we change the workouts at the studio daily and have a database of over three hundred exercises which I select from. It’s a dance though, because I don’t opt for variety purely to offset boredom of my members. I program the “big lifts” frequently, because to improve at an exercise, you need to get in the reps. I want people to experience that improvement.
In creating a song, there are multiple parts. The intro, verse, chorus, bridge, solo, interlude, and the outro. A recipe or pattern is used. Workouts are no different. It will vary based upon the goal, but an example for a strengthening and fat-burning workout could be as follows: warm-up, mobility or movement preparation drills, strength, power, and metabolic conditioning. Like a song, you may not like every part, but there’s always that part you like to sing along with. This is when I tell fellow trainers to determine effectiveness, you must consider all components other than does it make them sweaty and tired. This is where the fitness industry dropped the ball years ago, when it was believed every workout had to be a beatdown. “No Pain, No Gain” became an adopted mantra. I’m glad we have evolved from that.
A significant factor in making a workout fun is the way in that it is delivered. I was recently on an airline flight, when in a calm voice the pilot made an announcement that we were about to experience some turbulence. He had a tone like Barry White. The bumps that soon followed went by quicker. It’s amazing how hearing you have three sets of squats can sound when said with a smile. Mix in a chorus of, “You got this”, and it goes down a lot easier. People are attracted to positive energy and tend to mirror one another with it. There’s no place for a Debbie downer in the gym.
Go lift, lunge, and laugh. Have fun with your workout. If the goal is to make it a habit, and it should be, remember it doesn’t have to be torture. Everything won’t be rainbows and unicorns, but to make it stick you need to have fun along the way.