Resilience is the ability to quickly recover from setbacks. In order to increase our resilience, we must purposely put ourselves in a situation where we will constantly encounter setbacks.
We find that a great way to improve our overall resilience is to build it in our bodies and through our fitness. While a lot of resilience has to do with strengthening our bodies and our physical ability, most has to do with mental resilience. By testing our bodies, we have much to gain with our minds. The benefits from physical training can therefore spill over into every other facet offer lives. Not to mention the other health benefits of exercise, but we digress.
Some people prefer training with a partner because the teamwork aspect of exercise distracts from the physical discomfort. While we can hack our workouts to benefit our health, there’s nothing like running or planking that forces our minds to be tested. The most difficult exercises tend to be the still or solitary ones. Testing ourselves by including these into our fitness routines will have the benefit of exercising our brain, which is also like a muscle. If we repeat tasks or thought patterns, these become reinforced and strengthened, as they do in our bodies. If we often practice being in discomfort, our brains learn to more efficiently and better deal with said discomfort.
Remembering to treat our brains like muscles is very important as many parts of our days can become repetitive. While we improve through repetition, we can also face a plateau in performance, which we can end be introducing discomfort and forcing resilience.
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