…would have been the title of this blog post had I sent it last week.
You may have wondered why you haven’t heard from me for a while. Well last Thursday I had a mishap that nearly resulted in me losing a little piece of me.
My wife was heading out on a well deserved night out with the girls from work which she’d been looking forward to for weeks. This meant I had the night off work, was on Archie’s bath and bed duty (lots of fun, I don’t get to do it too often) and then I was going to watch John Wick – the sort of shallow, action-packed revenge movie that I could never convince Sal to watch.
Basically, everyone was happy.
I bid farewell to my wife and headed to the kitchen to prep some of those delicious sweet potato crisps to dunk in my guacamole while Archie finished his dinner.
I was rushing it, and didn’t bother to use the guard on the mandolin slicer…
Yep, I sliced straight through my thumb, nail and all, stopping just short of taking it clean off. There was a lot of blood, but I kept my cool – counted myself lucky that I did a first aid course just 4 days earlier – and patched it up as best I could.
Sal had to come home to drive me to Lewisham A&E (who were brilliant) and everyone’s evening was ruined.
Bad times.
So since then I’ve been fairly limited in using my right hand. It was suggested to me that I use some voice recognition software to write emails and blogs, however this didn’t go well. The already dramatic headline “I nearly chopped my thumb off” becoming the altogether more alarming “I nearly chopped by bum off”.
So I do still have a bum, and a thumb. How do I relate this back to health and fitness?
Excuses. That’s how. We all make excuses and procrastinate to avoid doing things, exercise and eating well being two of the most common victims. And most of the time these excuses are nonsense. But occasionally they’re entirely valid.
Sometimes life gets in the way, and at that point you need to simply accept it, promise yourself you’ll be back tomorrow, and move on.
There is no point in chastising yourself for skipping a workout or eating badly. Unless you’re a professional athlete it isn’t going to do any harm. The more we beat up on ourselves we create a negative association with the thing we’ve avoided and make it more likely we’ll repeat the mistake.
So acknowledge and accept you’ve had a hiccup, give yourself a break and start again tomorrow.
I’m now back at the keyboard and back training, so if you’ve had “the hiccups” for a while and want some help getting rid of them get in touch and we can have a chat.
Ian “skin-on-chips” Male
Personal Trainer
tel: 07966844057
e: [email protected]
www.greenwichtraining.com
Greenwich Training
Personal Training & Group Fitness in Greenwich, Blackheath and South East London.