Hello again, it’s the very last day of the month so that must mean it is time to issue another blog article.

There has been a theme over the past few months with my writing in these blogs and it has been very much of a “this is becoming a chore/I have other things to do” type vibe. I enjoy writing quite a lot. However as with most creative outlets, once you are forced to do it, a lot of the joy and creativity can be sucked out.

To be fair, no one is forcing me to sit down and write these every month, but in a competitive SEO driven world, having many words be published to your website and some of them relevant to your gym is a good thing to do. That and I made a commitment to one a month which I initially thought would be super easy and I would put days and days into blog articles and have sources coming out the wazoo and it was a violent time to be a keyboard in my life.

Fast forward to now and sources are slim on the ground and the keyboard gets put back in its holster a lot quicker than it used to. The reason is simple. I don’t have less to say or less inclination to put my big thoughts into the world but my priorities have shifted away and time is becoming harder to find, in the amounts I would like to create something reasonable and do justice to the bigger thoughts I have floating around.

So I guess I will continue to do these blogs for as long as I can, but I am relaxing my commitment to once a month. Not my ambition to do once a month blogs, but my associated guilt and anxiety about missing a month if a lot is going on. Literally no one other than me will be even marginally affected if I miss a month of these blogs I am quite certain.

I think that this is a quite translatable mindset to many of our pursuits in life, including exercise, which, in its essence, is hard work. Exercise may, or may not be, fun, but if you’re doing it right you’re putting quite a bit of effort into your sessions.

Thus, when someone walks into Amplify Fitness, the sentiments and feelings they have will be of possibilities and starting and the journey and many things which in six months time may well have disappeared almost completely. To be replaced with a sense of duty and in some cases almost a burden.

Exercise can become a duty to yourself, or to your trainer or peers or the wider community. It’s work, and while it has a great many benefits and we should all be undertaking some form of consistent, structured exercise, it’s not always going to spark joy. Sometimes the best you can hope for is that it sparks “I showed up -_-“.

Exercise is also one of those things that really has to be performed consistently over time to really bear fruit. There’s not a lot of instant gratification with exercise. You’ll get a PB here and there and when you redo your measurements there is a sense of achievement for sure, but day in and day out it can be a slog.

You can absolutely enjoy working out. The right format, the right people and the mindset you bring can make a workout pretty fun. I mostly don’t mind working out. I do it alone and in private as it suits me right now, however in the past when I have worked out with friends or clients it has been enjoyable, if for nothing else than witnessing someone else suffering the exact painful fate you are personally living through.

So we get to a point where the initial gleam of exercise has worn off and what we are left with is a tolerable amount of work which we do for ourselves each week which in the long term makes us feel better about everything.

It’s the same with this blog. It’s not a sparker of much joy, but it is a tolerable amount of work which long term will have benefits to Amplify Fitness (I hope) and therefore myself and the other people associated with it.

Thus, in answer to my own question which I posed in the title, yes, compared to the earlier blogs, I am indeed running out of steam. I will keep posting them though and even if they are not the best or deepest or most well sourced articles I’ve ever created, I will make time where I can. Hopefully this is meaningful to someone other than myself but even if it isn’t, it’s still worthwhile.

Much the same attitude can and should be applied to exercise. It’s not as glamourous or noble as fitpros and influencers trade on, but it is a dutiful and hugely beneficial effort that we do for ourselves. It doesn’t need to be more than that.

If you have found a place, the right people or a flow state where exercising does bring more to your life, that is a blessing to be cherished. This, like our motivation, may come and go as life changes, so it’s important to enjoy it while it’s there.

In other times, we fall back to our sense of duty to ourselves. We honour ourselves and the better life we can enjoy with thoughtful efforts to our physical health while we wait for the joy sparking to resume. It will in time.

Blogs and exercise. Choo Choo.