No one ever talks about how mentally difficult it is when you find yourself back in the gym and only having half the strength you used to.
It’s a serious struggle. In an instant you can find yourself feeling dumb, embarrassed, weak, angry, frustrated.
“How did I let this happen?”
It can be paralyzing if you let it. And honestly, several times lately I have let that voice win. And due to that, I started feeling worse.
When I don’t stick to my routine my old injuries flare up, my hypoglycemia is way worse, and it compounds on top of itself and I wind up in a bit of a tail spin.
I think everyone has their own version of this when they find themselves “off track”. Even if it’s just for a brief period of time. It’s still hard. You’re still hard on yourself. You still feel so damn discouraged. Even when you do get to the gym, it’s disheartening as fuck when you’re not where you used to be.
But.
You can’t let that win. Not long term. Instead you can forgive yourself for being human. You can honor the path and the journey for what it is and then you can choose to make a different choice.
You can choose to face all of those ugly feelings and lift that weight anyway… even if it is half the size of what you could do before.
Remember, that savage mode level strength you had… you still have it. It’s there. You created it in the first place and you’ll create it again. It’s on the other side of this hump. You’ll get there but you have to get there THROUGH the ugly feelings though. You have to face them. Feel them. Shut them down. And remind yourself what you are capable of.
When you go through something and truly work through it, not around it, or over it, or under it but straight through the muck of it, that’s how you learn and come out on the other side stronger than you were before.
Even the best fall down sometimes, friends, it’s about how you rise after that truly matters though.