My mother told me from a very young age to not pull faces, and if I did and the wind changed, that my face could stay like it was. Well, I am sure many people my age or younger would have heard the same from their mums or others. However, there is a metaphor in what my mum said. As in, when you see people pulling all sorts of faces when doing their weight training and other training efforts, they are entraining facial responses to self-imposed stress that, over time, can overlap into set facial patterns that will emerge while engaging in their normal activities in life.
Below are a few screenshots of slides from one of my workshop PowerPoints to consider next time you approach your workouts.
The downside of overreacting to your self-applied exercise stress is the message you give your immune system – perceiving you are in a fight-or-flight state. Constantly over-spiking the immune system trends towards the onset of a host of auto-immune diseases and disorders.
So keep that smile on your face when doing your best efforts and give away no clues that you’re engaging in a challenging exercise stress experience. This will bath all of the cells in your body with all of the nice perky life-enhancing forms of stress hormones and neurochemicals promoting physical and emotional growth. We need stress for this reason, it is when stress turns into distress that things go wrong.
Best wishes to all.