To train or not to train

There are always difficult times in our lives. Life can end up being our biggest opponent, beating us up and consequently, we struggle. Struggling can take effect in physical or emotional form. When we feel like that, should we stay home, or should we train?

When you’re having a tough time and things aren’t going right for you, it’s easy to use that as a reason to stay home. However, there are some real benefits to training. Firstly, it gets you out the house and, more importantly, allows you to exercise which releases endorphins – leaving your body with a series of positive effects. These magic little endorphins interact with the receptors in your brain that reduce your perception of pain. Endorphins also trigger a positive feeling in the body, similar to that of morphine. That is why healthy people tend to be happier. 

There are more benefits than just the chemical ones though. When you turn up to training, you’re surrounded by like-minded people, who, on that particular night, are probably in a better mood than you. When you’re around positive people it becomes increasingly more difficult to stay in a negative frame of mind. The real benefit for me is when you are training/sparring, it takes up every thought in my head. By avoiding someone punching you in the face, taking you down or submitting you, your brain is focussed on survival, drowning out the day’s problems. 

There have however, been times when I have not been at my best mentally and training just made it worse. My game is based on timing and transitions. So, I find if things are going sideways in my day-to-day life, these small areas of training become harder. And mentally, it is difficult to stay positive when life affects these. If I go a little deeper, when you’re feeling down, I find that it seems to amplify things that go bad at training. Things that usually wouldn’t bother you seem to have more of an effect and the downward spiral can start – “I suck”, “I shouldn’t have trained” and so on fills the mind. There have been times that you come to training a bit low and when you have a couple of bad rounds, you’d rather be anywhere but there. So you sit against the wall and have some rounds off and it is becomes a very tough night. 

I don’t know if it’s because I am not competing anymore or because I am older but dealing with these situations has become much easier. Now all I do is take it for what it is – a bad night. I just keep training and stick to the basics. However, now I can see it happening in other people and I will go sit with them and have a chat in their round off. I know how it feels and I can tell you, it sucks.

More often than not, I find that training does make anything better – injuries, illness or emotions. For me, it takes my mind off whatever is going wrong and makes the brain go towards a more positive place. It is very rare that you would feel worse after training. At the very base of it all, doing something is better than doing nothing and that goes for all aspects of life. There are not many times in life that doing nothing makes anything better, we make things better by moving. The act of getting off the couch and going to training is a hell of a lot more beneficial to your mental state than staying at home. It brings me back to the saying that motivated me while I was fighting, “anyone can do it when they feel like it, it’s the people that do it when they don’t feel like it who succeed”. So in short if you are having one of those days / weeks you are better off going to training than staying at home.

Gareth Lewis
Head MMA Instructor