How (NOT) to encourage your exercising friend…
We all know her... She’s the friend who joins the exercise
craze-du-jour, and tells all of her exercise-averse friends it’s the best thing going, only to burn out a
few weeks later. Or maybe she’s the girl who avoids breaking a sweat with every
fiber of her being. She hears a new diagnosis from her doctor, and is off to
the gym to reverse the effects of the last three decades she’s spent in the
McDonald’s drive-through. Or maybe she has a chronic illness, and you’ve been
praying with her to find relief, and gently nudging her toward lifestyle
changes that may help.
One day (maybe around the season of New Year’s resolutions),
she calls to tell you she’s started a home workout regimen or joined an
exercise class. Perhaps she’s even registered to run her first 5K or
Half-Marathon!
“Good for her,” you think! “I can’t wait to see her make these
changes, and experience lasting results!” Or maybe, like the snarky female
hiding within a few of us, you think to yourself “Yeah, right… you mean just
like the ‘long-term’ change you made last January, and abandoned before
Valentine’s Day?!” Outwardly, you encourage, and promise to follow up with her.
You plan to keep her accountable, knowing from experience that such
encouragement is key to her stick-to-it-iveness. After all, you’re the friend everyone
knows spends an hour at the gym every morning, just because it energizes you!
(I’ve never understood that. Ten minutes in the gym puts me in the mood for a
long winter’s nap!)
Two days later, you make a bee-line to her after church to
ask how it’s going. In her eagerness, she regales you with the nitty-gritty
details of how hard she worked out, and how much better she’s already feeling.
She’s about to experience several potential pitfalls in her new-found life.
Beware! Here are a few of the things she may face in the first few weeks:
1) She gets so excited about being able to stick
with something that she over-does it initially. She ends up with more soreness
than she had anticipated, and uses that as an excuse to skip the next class or
training day to recover. Uh-oh…
2) She gets so excited, and tells her praying
friends how much the exercise is helping her pain issues! Two weeks later, she
realizes that the exercise that strengthens her ____ is causing damage to her
____ (fill in the blanks… it’s different for every person). Her doctor
instructs her to stop this program, but doesn’t make strong suggestions about a different
regimen. She quits… again… and is discouraged by her body’s unwillingness to
change. (Her friends, most of whom do not face chronic health issues, will see
this as another flash-in-the-pan ending in failure. She’s even less likely to reach
out for help with her next hare-brained scheme!)
3) She sticks with her new plan faithfully for
three weeks, seeing results in her emotions (I can do this!) and her health (I
feel better!). But then she, or her child, or her husband, or the entire
household, comes down with a cold, or flu, or some other malady that hangs on for
weeks. By the time they’ve kicked it, she’s lost the courage, or the
motivation, to rejoin her exercise class or training group, and is kicking
herself for wasting the initial outlay of money.
[I have a family member who suffers with chronic auto-immune diseases. I also have a family member with chronic joint pain and degeneration (Thanks for the genes, Mom!). And I have bounced back and forth between my eagerness to be healthy and my apathy toward anything which requires sweat. These days, I find myself, too, dealing with a diagnosis that promises to completely change my perspective of an active lifestyle. Over the years, I have tried, and found temporary success with, Curves, WiiFit, several less regimented at-home programs, and most recently, a local gym with child-care options. Last summer, after six months of 2-3 gym workouts per week, the pain in my hips had gotten bad enough to require a visit to an orthopedic specialist. He determined that the exercise had brought to light a new and much more serious problem: dysplasia in both hips which had resulted in degeneration and arthritis. Unless something changes, he expects me to have bi-lateral hip replacements in the next ten years. YIKES! I don't expect that I'll have any more time for that in my mid-40s than I do now, in my 30s. And I'll have even less time, the way the grand-kids are coming, so I have to make more changes… and it's time to make them “smarter.”]
After starting yet another program designed specifically for my health-crisis-du-jour, I am again trusting God for results, and for long-term success. Here are a few of my thoughts on what YOU can do when you have a friend in a similar situation:
DO:
- Call or visit frequently, especially in the first few weeks, encouraging her to be faithful to her plan.
- Ask about obstacles she may have discovered since the initial commitment was made. Is her child-care working out? Does the schedule need tweaked to help her be more faithful? Is there some other need she may not have thought of, which could derail her progress in the future?
- Offer to join her one day – do her workout video with her at home, or get a guest pass at her gym for a day, if she would enjoy your company.
DON’T:
- Forget to encourage her after the first week has passed. It might be appropriate to ask less frequently, but you know from experience how much easier it will be if she can establish this as a true “habit” in her life!
- Insist on joining her if she’s not comfortable. She may very well be self-conscious about her starting point. The last thing she’ll want is to be face to face with the Workout Maven as she makes her own paltry attempts.
- Start second guessing her when she faces obstacles. If she has always faced chronic pain issues, she may be surprised by how little immediate progress she makes. If she faces severe pain with a chosen workout, encourage her to explore other options until she finds the right fit. Invite her to try something you've found success with. Broaden her horizons!
- Assume that she’ll stick with it forever once she starts to see progress. There is a reason she burns out in the first 6 weeks time and again – it may be health, pain, family issues, time management, or a simple lack of character. She needs your continued encouragement and will thank you for it, in the long run (pun intended)!
- Mock what passes as exercise in her book. If she’s been sedentary, or worse yet, in pain, for months or years, the level of activity that makes her sweat, or causes her soreness, will be very different from what you expect. Encourage her to stick with what she’s doing, and be very cautious about encouraging her to move it up a notch. Better that she be faithful over time with less activity than that she go over-board and quit altogether!
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