What Motivates You?

What motivates you? I mean in terms of your health and fitness what encourages you to do the training, to eat healthy foods, to get enough sleep and to basically care enough to take of your health?

And not only is this different for all of us it is different for each of us at different points in our lives. For example, I'll admit that when I was younger my reasons for living a healthy life were different than they are today. Actually I should re-phrase that. When I was younger the reasons for my decisions were more aesthetic then performance or health oriented. Case in point, I would be diligent in training, eating quality foods and buying whatever supplements I could afford in order to look my best. On the weekends I would hope all my efforts would help attract the attention of the opposite sex.

In fact, as a university student I quickly realized a few things about supplements:

1. Not all of them work as advertised.

2. They were all marketed towards helping me achieve my end goal.

3. They were expensive.

Expensive in the sense that as a university student it wasn't cheap to find another $200 per month for bars, shakes, protein powders and creatine. So to that end I found a solution.

I realized the Court Club in Regina was not selling supplements so I approached the owner Carm about letting me help set them up with an account to sell supplements. By doing so I was able to purchase supplements at cost through the distributor using the gym's account.

So you can see I was pretty motivated to train, eat healthily and have access to discounted supplements.

But nowadays my priorities have changed. Now my goals are more about my health, being able to do all the sports I want at the highest level and being illness and pain-free. And about being able to do all these things with my daughter. But I still want to look good.

And it's funny how after getting married and having kids your priorities change. Hopefully for the better. Recently a photo of me from 8-9 years ago surfaced of when my training had other goals. And it got me to thinking.

Am I doing my best?

Can I eat more healthily?

Can I look like that again?

And regardless of the answer to these the key is that it got me thinking. I got me to pause and reflect on my current actions and how they were impacting my health.

And I came to a basic conclusion.

Every action I make brings me closer or takes me further from my health goal.

It is as simple as that.

Will I train today or not? Will I eat for health or convenience? Will I get adequate sleep tonight or not? Will I carry around the stressors of life or let them go? Will I focus on the positives in my life and be grateful or be negative and unappreciative?

Really it all comes to choice.

And sometimes in order to make the right choice we simply need a little motivation. Maybe it's seeing a picture of yourself from days of better health. Maybe it's someone else's story that resonates with you. Maybe it's the pain finally became great enough to stay 'that's it...I done with living this way...today we change for the better'.

For me the picture has helped. It's going to kick me in the butt to step things up. But in the long run I know that to have sustained success a healthy life will allow me to have:

* a better relationship with my wife and daughter

* a better bottom line at work

* better experiences in life in general

So what about you? What motivates you? Will it be a weight loss reality show? Will it be a picture from your past? Will it be the pain of achy and sore joints? Or an emotional pain? Or will it be something bigger than yourself?

Because here's the thing...once you figure out the answer to the question 'what motivates you?', training, eating right and getting sleep will never feel like work again.

Chris [fb-like]

ps...for those of that have read this far here is the picture I was referring