Daily life gets SO busy doesn’t it? It’s so full of stuff to do all the time! Sometimes it feels like time is being sucked out of you without you really even realising it, like a leach when it’s attached unbeknownst to you and before you realise, it’s taken loads of blood without you even noticing…Yuck!
The never ending tasks that need to be completed each day through work, family and friends, can get overwhelming sometimes and I don’t even have kids! God help me if I did have kids as I certainly would not be coping too well to get everything done right now!
In these times of being overwhelmed with so many daily tasks and generally being busy with many of these tasks being done for others, we can often quite easily forget about ourselves and our own needs in the process.
We often really need to schedule in self-time for it to ever happen at all. It can initially seem overindulgent, especially if you have others in your family, like a partner or children, but this very important self-time, goes hand in hand with today’s topic of Self-Love!
Taking time out for yourself, doing the things that you love is crucial to recharging your own batteries so that you have more to give others.
Sometimes I feel that people are unconsciously punishing themselves and feeling as though they’re failing if they need to take time out and do the things they love and enjoy.
This often comes from a very unhealthy and distorted work ethic which seems to relate the time spent doing a task (especially at work), will equate to productivity. However this is far from reality.
The longer we have to complete a task, the longer it will often take to get the task done and often the quality isn’t great at all as we often can’t concentrate for such long periods of time continuously.
When we relate this to exercise and movement, it’s often thought the longer you spend exercising, the more you get out of it and most often, this isn’t true.
Loads of research is currently showing us that shorter bouts of intense exercise is much more beneficial for fat loss, cardiovascular fitness, as well as strength. It’s all about quality of movement, rather than quantity of movement.
When we take the time out for self-love activities, like exercise, we should be mindful of giving the body what it needs. We all too often have a distorted perception of what our body needs and we often end up punishing it instead of giving it self-love!
The ‘No pain no gain’ concept is definitely taken out of context regularly. This is normally referring to discomfort rather than pain and with exercise, we do often need to get out of our comfort zone to get results. However, this doesn’t mean that we should be in physical pain to do so!
I often teach my clients and students that pain is your friend, but only if you listen to it and they need to stop immediately doing what is causing them pain, as pain is most often the body giving you a warning of danger.
But unfortunately, most people don’t listen and keep going, which is where injuries occur and exercise is no longer self-love, but a form or self-sabotage. There can be some deep underlying emotional issues related to self-sabotage, which I’m not qualified to speak about, but I do see it quite often.
I often find that I need to hold people back from themselves as there can be a tendency for people to do way too much of the things that they don’t really need to be doing for their body type or needs.
I see this pattern most commonly with athletes and with endurance sports (both pro and amateur) as the time spent doing their sport or activity never matches the time they need to unwind from all the exercise.
To explain this, I created some terms to describe this imbalance and to help people simply understand what is happening, so to help them be able to make appropriate changes and understand what it is that they’re doing to themselves and what I’m trying to do for them.
These terms that I use are Soft Tissue Budgeting™ (STB), Soft Tissue Debt™ (STD) and Soft Tissue Saving™ (STS). I’ve related them to money as people often listen better when you talk about money!
When budgeting money, we need to find the right balance between money spent and money saved from the money that we’ve earnt.
So if we spend too much we will go into debt, therefore we need to save some money to prevent this debt and by not spending too much, we’ve already saved.
The same thing happens with our body’s soft tissue; the more we exercise, the more that tension develops in the soft tissue and it gets tighter and tighter and our soft tissue becomes heavier and heavier and in turn it becomes spent and fatigued, which reduces the range of
motion and the body finds it’s harder to do the things that we want and need to do due to the fatigue.
If this happens for too long and the tension keeps building up, often the soft tissue reaches a point where it’s so tight, that inflammation occurs, hence more pain i.e. Soft Tissue Debt.
Remember if we listen, pain is our friend, but if we don’t we will most definitely get injured which is a form of forced rest as the body is saying:
“I can’t keep going on like this and you’re not listening to me so I’m going to have to force you to stop…na na na na na”.
So to negate the effects of tension in the soft tissue, we need to release the tension developed as we go and which I consider to be Soft Tissue SavingTM which really needs to be done each day.
There are various forms of STS and some of which include:
- Massage.
- Stretching.
- Ice Baths.
- Wearing of compression garments.
- Safe and pain free Foam Rolling.
The best time and cost effective way which I’ve found to perform STS is of course Foam Rolling safely and pain free on a daily basis!
Therefore, the perfect balance between the two is what I consider to be Soft Tissue Budgeting.
So for me, Foam Rolling safely and pain free using the 3in1 MoveBetterRollerTM is just another way of saying, Self Love.
I’d really love to help you get the most Self Love out of Foam Rolling so please contact me directly for assistance. I guarantee that your body will seriously love you for it!
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Angelo Castiglione – Movement Specialist
