Keri McKibbin Personal Training

Gareth Southgate who recently finished as England manager, after a Euro final loss, said today he was struggling to find his “next purpose in life”.

Traditional society thinking is “he has loads of money and time now with zero pressure, he should ‘enjoy’ it”!!! 

By that I presume people mean go on a ‘permanent holiday’, eating and drinking what he wants, not rising much before midday and never tackling anything that could be classed as challenging ever again.

The reality for him though he said he was used to performing at his very highest level when coaching England, and the responsibility that went with it. 

The void now is huge he says, and illustrates the emptiness in many people’s lives of the strong sense of purpose leaving their lives, even temporarily.

Southgate spoke about the England job keeping him track, giving his life structure and made his life more fulfulling.

These are all crucial elements of making us happy as a human beings, when we serve others often and do it well.

Society used to tell us to ‘slow down as we get older’, ‘take challenge out of our lives’, but the reality seems to be it’s a poor choice. 

We need that sense of purpose to get us out of bed every day, we need to realise we can be very fit and healthy well into retirement and how essential it really is, and we all need to have a strong sense of purpose that challenges us, or the emptiness from not having that can be highly destructive for our physical, mental and emotional health.

Exercise can be worked on, or you slide back.

Everyone who has exercised and then not exercised will agree with this hopefully , if you do not work on your strength, balance, lung capacity, getting your heart stronger-a minimum THREE times a week (out of 7 possible days), then those areas will not improve constantly.

Getting stronger is vital not only for your muscles, but your bone density too, crucial as you get older in every single area.Improving your balance is vital-as you age you will know people who have falls due to poor balance and often they don’t often recover from it

.Lung capcity is vital to do anything worth doing in life, which goes hand in hand with heart strength, and don’t forget heart disease is still the biggest killer in the UK.

Taking these things for granted is something most people do, UNTIL problems start.You have every opportunity to do great things the RIGHT way with us-take them.

When someone with arthritis wanted to exercise decades ago in the hope of getting out of pain, I found those individuals very nervous indeed, in fact they were more inclined to put up with the pain, rather than dare to exercise in the hope of improving their quality of life, it was a tough challenge to get them to even think about exercising..

Then the wet months of winter (around now) would make it worse, the cold too would make even more painful, many felt hopeless against the ever increasing pain.

But the people who did exercise through the pain and eventually get stronger, also got a lot of the pain out of their body. 

They started moving better, they started getting more energy and the winter months that were previously out of bounds when it came to exercising, became much more enjoyable as exercising became firmly a big part of their daily routine.

The results from exercising, as well as overhauling what they regularly ate and drunk on a daily basis, often transformed their lives.

The science has now caught up with what we saw in the real life exercise field a long time ago, if you don’t use your body, it will start to seize up, pain will invade your body over time and eating right makes a massive difference to your energy levels, your recovery from exercise and overall health and wellbeing.

Don’t forget your mental health too, if you have decreased aches and pains in your body, you automatically feel much better, there is fresh hope in your life and you are very much more motivated to keep moving and only improve your performances, as you get much more confident exercising.