"We don't have too little time, we just have other priorities"
If you ask us why we go to the gym, you're bound to get a lot of different answers from different people. Who wants to look good, who needs to address a health concern that exercise can do wonders for, who claims to feel good from exertion. Some people exercise to achieve a sporting result.
Let me give you an example of a coffee party. Some days I've probably had 99 cups of coffee. I haven't counted exactly, but it's been a lot, I think less than a hundred. The first signal in my head that makes me drink coffee, and probably many others, is that we eat breakfast. Eating breakfast is the signal in many people's heads that makes our feet move towards the coffee machine all by themselves. At the very moment when the smell of fried eggs reminded us of coffee, we had an irresistible urge to grab a hot, steaming cup of cappuccino. So our response to this desire is to set the coffee machine to work, and we are prepared to endure any inconvenience that comes our way in the name of this desire.
In his book "Atomic Habits", James Clear draws a diagram that explains our behaviour and choices. First, we receive a signal or cue in our brain that triggers a craving. If the craving is strong and we have the opportunity (or create the opportunity), then we take the action (response), followed by the reward, or the reason why we wanted to do the action in the first place.
Somehow, whenever I feel like drinking coffee, the coffee maker has a bunch of needs - add water, beans, change the water filter, clean the residue. Since I have a craving for coffee, I'm even willing to endure a 15-minute coffee machine cleaning cycle. The first sip of a strong cappuccino with a nice milk froth makes me forget all the suffering beforehand. A little caffeine kick in the brain has become a necessity.
Sounds a bit like a drug addict, doesn't it? At the same time, in another scene, someone wakes up and feels that their hands are shaking and they don't feel well (hint). He wishes his hands weren't shaking and it wasn't so bad to be there any more, instead it could be nice (lust). Fortunately, there is a way to be happy. You have to steal an old aunt's silver chain or a friend's laptop and take it to a pawnshop and the money to a dealer you know, and then you stick a syringe in a vein around the corner (the answer) and a feeling of pleasure comes over your body (the prize).
In that sense, we are all a bit addicted, in that every thing we want to do is driven by the same cycle. Whether it's eating, drinking, having sex, watching TV or thumbing through the Instagram feed. Of course, cultural and physical pursuits such as reading, going to the theatre or exercising also make the list.
But there is one big difference when it comes to exercise. I don't know anyone who regrets not exercising afterwards. But I don't really know anyone who knows anyone who doesn't make any effort at all. Unfortunately, the effort is unpleasant. So our minds are in a constant state of sausage and sausage before we get to the gym.
Who still remembers the scales in the shops of the Soviet era? If you had waited in a long queue and were finally asked for 300g of doctor sausage, the salesman would throw two black pommies - 100 and 200g - on one side of the scales and cut a good chunk of sausage stick on the other. If he was a pro, the sausage came out more or less right away. Sometimes a bit more sausage was added and to even out the scales, a couple of smaller weights had to be added to the other half. "Can 320 g stay?" was a fairly standard question and of course 320 g could stay. It wasn't like there was sausage in the shop every day. The salesman had to wrap the sausage in white paper and use a pencil to write "77 kopecks" for the cashier. In the country shop, where the same salesman was cashier, he would of course move the corresponding number of slices on the counter.
It's the same with training as with sausage. We pile our discomfort (it's raining outside!), the missed pleasure of missing the rerun of "Sex and the City" and think about the sore shins tomorrow. Inevitably, we have to put family time and other enjoyable hobbies on the scale. If those weight bombs become more than a sausage roll, then once again the workout will not happen.
In November 2017, together with personal trainer Britta Alep and Kristjan Kimmel, SportID's Marketing Manager at the time, we conducted a small survey among SportID users, which at the time numbered just over 32 000 (today, there are 4 times as many Stebbys). The results were that 98% out of 2700 respondents said they valued a sporty lifestyle. 66% out of all respondents said that unfortunately they did not think they were active enough. 88% of all respondents said that if they had the opportunity they would do more sport. We also asked people to list the obstacles they face today. More than half of the people mentioned that their main concern was lack of time, and we didn't give them that as a choice, but their own fingers typed in those magic three letters - A-E-G - in the Google form box.
Clearly, this is not really a lack of time, but a matter of prioritisation. Recent US President Barack Obama managed to get 45 minutes of exercise every day. I find it quite difficult to imagine that in a small European country called Estonia, 1500 people who have more important things to do in their lives, so their schedules are even busier than Barack Obama's and they simply do not have time to exercise, ended up answering our random survey.
Back to weighing sausages. If Martin Helme has said that he will fight for the longest sausage in the negotiations within the governing coalition to be forked, then we cannot be any worse. It is now up to us to figure out how to make sure that more sausages get weighed than those black weight bombs on the other side.
This post is the first chapter of an e-book called New Beginnings written by Marti Soosaare. You can certainly read the following chapters on this blog, but if you can't wait, you can download the e-book. HERE
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