Room for improvement!

This goes along a little bit with my last post on finding the good in a situation. I was at the gym this morning with Charlene where she made me do a million push ups. Now, understand, I love working out and exercising. I do almost anything and love that burning feeling in your muscles and being out of breath. I love the aching afterward and getting beat up in the process. I can and will do almost anything and LOVE it! But there is one thing I have always done, but always hated: Push ups.

Surprised? Yes, push ups and I have a love-hate relationship. I depends on the day when we get along. I hated them so much that when I took my seven Black Belt tests, I was so focused and almost never made a mistake, for the sole purpose of not having to do push ups. It worked too.

I teach the ladies in my fitness classes to do push ups on their knees especially when we do like reps of 30 multiple times. So I have always done them the "girly" way, as some trainers call it. But not with Charlene. I have the best of the best, so she is going to make me do full push ups. -______-

I struggled the first few workouts with her. This is my fifth workout with her this summer and I am already seeing and feeling improvement. But as a Black Belt, when I see myself struggling with something, I make sure THAT particular drill I can not only master but exceed! I would do that with every Black Belt test I had. One of those tests I had to jump rope 500 times and was allowed five misses. So after that test, I made sure I could do 1000 with only two missed! From there I was able to do 30 min straight with no mistakes! Another time I had to do a 3 min plank on a ball. I made sure I could do THREE 3 min planks on a ball.

Always pushing the envelope! Well last week Charlene made me do bicep curls with 35 pounds for three sets of 20. The third set I struggled big time. It was the first time in years I have brought my muscles "to failure." That is a technical term by the way, not a knock. It was wonderful! But there was something that really stuck out in my mind from last week.

Charlene asked me to do a proper pull up. You hold onto a bar with your feet hanging, and pull your entire body up with the chin over the bar. I could barely pick myself up for one. I was like "Oh no, this will NOT do." Now initially, I was like "I'm so sad I want to cry, not able to do even one." But Charlene hit it right on the head:

"Great! That means there is room for improvement!"

BINGO! What a great paradigm! That is what a master is supposed to do! I believe it was W. Clement Stone who said "With every negative is the seed of an equal or greater positive." And the truth in that statement is unbelievable. Just like the story of Moses, you have to take out that magnifying glass and find that positive.

I knew a woman who was trying to get a job in this big department and they were taking up to 300 people. She was not one of them. I asked her how she felt about that and she said "Great! Because that means there is something even better I am supposed to do!" What a great mindset! This is the mindset we all need to take hold of and condition our minds to think!

So back to the push ups, I did SO MANY this morning with Charlene! We did regular, with dumb bells adding the press, downward angle, with a ball and jump onto it, rolling the ball, balancing on the machine, and the core work wheel. Instead of saying I hate push ups, I should begin to say how much I LOVE THEM. You gotta fake it to make it, right?

So here are three goals with Charlene I have for the end of the summer as room for MY improvement! By the end of the summer I will be able to do pull ups, push up onto the ball (which I MAJORLY struggled with), and one handed push ups! You heard it here first!

Yours in service,
A TRENTO