I love working out, it makes me feel good and I know it does my body good. But those aren’t the only reason why I have, or why other people do, workout.
When working out there are usually three different kinds of motivation, I call them competitive motivation, beautification motivation and bettering motivation.
First for a loose definition.
Competitive motivation can be closely linked between beautification motivation and bettering motivation. I tend to think of it as something to practise physically with the main idea of winning a competition in mind. When I was younger I just did this kind of exercise. I did gymnastics and I wasn’t thinking about how I looked or how healthy I was, just about winning the next competition and being the best.
Beautification motivation is when you work out just for looks. But this can yet again be linked with bettering and Competitive motivation. If you want to lose weight with only thinking about looking better, this is clearly beautification motivation, but if you are partly doing it to become more healthy, then you may be crossing into bettering motivation. I like to think the working out a Victoria secret model would do is beautification motivated.
And last but not least, bettering motivation. It took me a while to truly work out for this reason. I work out to become a better version of myself. Not to just look better or thinner or to just be better than someone else, but to know that I am a strong and in good shape, by good shape I don’t mean literal shape, I mean more of a health shape. As I am very bottom heavy and no amount of working out is going to make my breasts bigger and make me look more of a ‘pretty shape’. But that is perfectly ok, because I work out when I know it’s going to make me stronger and that it’s going to give me a nice boost of good feeling hormones.
The struggles with finding the balance.
I would be lying if I said I never worked out because I felt like I didn’t look like some of the other girls at my school. At some point I actually started exercising manically because a side effect of my medication at the time was weight gain and something called ‘moon face’, which made you gain water weight around your face. I desperately wanted to exercise every second of everyday. But it wasn’t for the right reasons. And after talking to my mum and my doctors, I realised no amount of exercise would change what I wanted it to change, and exercising manically everyday wasn’t good for you.
Nice fact: The way your muscles get stronger is though tiny tears you make when working out, and those tears are healed and rebuilt stronger. So if you never give your muscles a break, it’s not going to help you to get any stronger.
To me, working out is defiantly a bettering thing for me. It helps my depression and helps to rebuild muscle I’ve lost when sick and malnourished. For me I just have to bear in mind how much energy exercise takes for me. As a sufferer of numerous diseases this can severely affect my energy. So even if I know doing some exercise one day will make me feel better, I might just have to not do it because I know the next day I have work or school and using up that energy one day isn’t going to be that productive in the long run.
So why don’t you think about why you work out? It may reveal some things about yourself you didn’t realise.