Do Your Damn Push Ups!

I treat children with ADHD and other psychological conditions.

I tell them to drink their milk and do their push ups.

I think this is a throw back to my childhood when Hulk Hogan would always tell the kids to “take their vitamins”.

When they come back in for a recheck, I ask them “Are you doing your push ups?”.

They look at me like I’m crazy.

Now, it’s easy to point the finger, shake our heads, and say “Kids these days”. But, it’s not so easy to admit that we have the same problem.

I had a patient tell me that he just didn’t have much of an appetite. He was needing to get in some extra protein but just couldn’t stomach it. I told him that I didn’t care if it tasted good or not. That’s not the point. The point is to just eat.

You’ve got to think about your food and your exercise as medicine. Because actually, it’s the best medicine

Of course, if it’s fun it’ll go down better. But that’s not going to be the case most of the time. And it’s your discipline in those situations that will make all the difference.

Discipline can be trained.

The easiest way to be more disciplined is to have a routine. But it takes conscious EFFORT to do something over and over again in order to create the routine. So in some ways it takes a little discipline to create the routine and then the routine enforces the discipline.

I’ll give you an example…

You don’t exercise but want to start. Here’s what you do. You set your alarm 30 mins earlier than normal. You get up, say your prayers, drink a cup of coffee, and go for a 20 minute walk.

Easy.

Well, kind of. The hard part will not be hitting snooze. You see, that’s the part that takes a little bit of effort. But once you overcome that initial inertia to stay in bed, it just gets easier. And after you’ve done this every day for a month, it becomes your routine. Routine becomes a habit. And habits are hard to break.

You can then build from this habit. Perhaps you slowly turn the 20 minute walk into a 20 minute jog or 20 minutes of push ups and squats and sit ups. Maybe you get up a little earlier every day and before you know it, you’ve go an extra hour. The possibilities are infinite.

The thing is…

It sucks to get of bed in the morning. But, it’s also sucks to live with metabolic disease, obesity, joint pain, and other health problems.

You have to choose your suck.

Which will it be?