Like almost all of my high school classmates, participating in school sports was one of the main ways I spent my free time. From the age of 12 until she was 17, much of my life was spent in the chlorine-filled world of competitive swimming. In addition to participating on the high school varsity team, a year-round swim club was also established. When I was most passionate about the sport, I practiced several mornings before class, spent study hall time in the school weight room, practiced for two hours in the afternoon during the week, and swam on the weekends. It was a typical week spent at a convention. . Then, along with the rest of the world, everything came to a halt in the spring of 2020.
I went from spending 15 hours a week at the pool to only being able to exercise in my living room. All the passion and drive I once felt for my sport disappeared instantly. Eventually, a local pool became available for swimming, but there were no more swim meets to look forward to, and going around a lap began to feel more and more pointless. Losing the only exciting part of a sport so monotonous was the final blow to my burgeoning sports burnout. I no longer had any desire to incorporate working out into my lifestyle, and I’m still trying to figure it out. The struggle is the same for many athletes who graduate from high school but choose not to join a college team. A workout that once felt like a difficult but worthwhile step toward the goal of improving athletic performance can start to feel empty and meaningless without a goal to work towards. The process of creating new goals, beyond the vague idea of ”becoming healthier,” turned out to be much more work than I had imagined.
The fitness and health messages that surround us are also completely unhelpful. We’re pushing the narrative that fitness should be a “go big or go home” endeavor. Many of the popular influencers who make a point of sharing their lives and workout routines on social media manage to spend more than two hours a day and six days a week at the gym. spending. They drink protein shakes for breakfast and constantly post content that is nothing more than thinly veiled thirst traps. If your routines are only extreme examples, you can end up feeling as if there is no point in trying because you will never achieve the standards set by others. there is.
Even worse, when you start remembering all the time you used to be able to spend working out, the fact that you’re no longer working out can become very embarrassing. The only place you can look for guidance on where to start, past routines that have worked well, and social media influencers promoting super healthy lifestyles can leave you with thoughts of fear and shame. When you meet, you feel like you can’t do anything except run away from the problem and ignore it.
If you have an “all-or-nothing” approach to fitness, thinking you need to master it completely without anyone’s help, trying to figure it all out on your own can be a lonely and wasteful experience. There is a possibility that Add in the shame of self-comparison to both others and your younger self, who seem to have achieved what you now desperately desire, and the experience of trying to get healthy again two years after quitting sports in high school It can prove to be a difficult, emotional, and unsuccessful journey.