May | 2018 | Some Words That Say What I Think

The internet is one of the most significant inventions of the past 100 years and was probably designed with the intention of providing us with instant access to information and the ability to communicate with people across the world.

However, sometimes it seems like the internet was created for the sole purpose of distracting me.

The internet has the power to completely and utterly eradicate any semblance of focus that I have previously established.

For me, the site that poses the biggest threat to concentration is YouTube.

The majority of the videos on YouTube are short and it is therefore easy to click on a video under the impression that you are taking a brief break from being productive.

However, each individual video is linked within a seemingly infinite network other videos.

By clicking on a video, you are heading directly into a trap.

Whenever I go on YouTube, I feel a bit like Hansel and Gretel, except instead of following a trail of breadcrumbs to the house of an evil witch, I am following a trail of video clips, moving rapidly towards a procrastination pit.

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When I first started doing exercise, I found it quite hard to motivate myself so I bought an ambitious amount of sportswear in the hope that wearing it would help me get into the mind-set of an athlete.

I reasoned that, if I looked like an athlete, I could delude my body into thinking it was capable of performing impressive feats of strength and endurance.

Once I started exercising, I was able to maintain this illusion of supreme athleticism for a short amount of time.

However, it soon became clear that I wasn’t an elite athlete and was, in fact, just a regular bog-standard unfit person.

Before exercising, I would perform elaborate warm-up routines in preparation for what I assumed would be a high intensity workout.

Warm up stretches are a useful way to prepare your body for exercise.

However, they are considerably less useful when they are used to actively avoid doing exercise in the first place.

Eventually, I decided that I needed to be more disciplined in my approach to exercise so I drew up a plan that detailed exactly how I was going to spend each workout to ensure that I spent less time stretching and more time actually exercising.

I thought that if I could stick to my workout plan, I would eventually fall into a routine and motivating myself to do exercise wouldn’t be such a struggle.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t long until my workouts started to deviate slightly from the routines that I had originally set out for myself.

At one point, I also tried going to exercise classes in the hope that the group camaraderie would help drag me through the workout.

The concept of the exercise class has been around since Mulan times (very historically accurate…) in which the renowned military personal trainer Li Shang whipped his recruits into shape to the tune of the song ‘I’ll Make A Man Out Of You’

‘I’ll Make A Man Out Of You’ is a highly motivational song that makes getting fit feel like a heroic mission.

However, the message relayed to participants in fitness boot camps nowadays tend to be slightly less stirring and dramatic .

At the end of the day, there is only one thing that will truly encourage me to exercise.

In theory, healthy exercise cancels out unhealthy cake consumption and everything balances out at a vaguely acceptable level of healthiness (this is a very scientifically accurate statement that I tell myself so that I can eat cake without feeling too guilty…)

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