Working it out on the bag

What with Thanksgiving last week, Hanukkah celebrations this week and Christmas looming it’s the time of year when many of us can get hugely over-anxious and stressed out!  Sure some of us manage to get through it all with great joy in our hearts and nary a hurt feeling to consider, but many of us experience other emotions and have moments when we’d like nothing better than to chuck it all for a week in some other part of the world, preferably one without phones or email!

I’ve found that making the commitment to work out is a particularly helpful way to cope.  Whether it’s boxing, dancing, aikido, kickboxing, swimming, running or spinning for that matter — pursuing an active, physically engaging activity can provide a terrific way of getting rid of all the toxins that inevitably build during the countdown to the “holidays” and not just from all that overeating.

I like to think of it as working it out on the bag.  I take the plethora of “stuff” that inevitably gets kicked-up and give it a place to go.

Working it out on the bag means that you have a chance to chuck those things out of your body as a means of ridding yourself of the emotions that may otherwise be difficult to cope with.   And while I’ve found that the physical sensation of extending my body and hitting things gives me the chance to release a lot of “stuff,” any active physical experience of pounding something gives the sensation of pushing your body to its limit, such as the feel of the pavement when you’re running or a gym floor when you’re jumping rope.

The point is, these next few weeks are fraught with the pitfalls of a lot of heightened expectations including your own.  Perhaps the best present you can give yourself is the chance to work it all out on the bag long before you get to the point where you want to scream, cancel Christmas or take to your bed for days and days in the hopes that it’ll all end soon.

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