Day 3 My relationship with exercise

The prompt for day 3 has me thinking about the tricky relationship I’ve built with exercise over the past year. I walk around 2 miles every other day after work (or on weekends), and it always seems to put me in a good mood. This was my primary exercise when I started avoiding hand-related workouts due to thumb/wrist pain.

Around the time I started physical therapy (5 months in), I started going to free yoga classes at my gym twice a week. I felt like my wrist caused more pain after this (after around 3 weeks), so I stopped going. A couple of months later, I started going to the entry-level strength training class (with low/customizable weights on a bar). I did this for a month or two, but slowed down because I felt like my forearm had an aggravated muscle or tendon. Neither the wrist or forearm discomfort have seemed to decrease much with rest, and act up with weirdly minor activities.

I just started going back to yoga, with an attitude that it is not causing my pain. My brain has already tried to tell me yesterday that the discomfort must be due to the yoga class, but I have a strong feeling that it would have felt the same regardless. I am going to keep going 2-3 times/week while being mindful of my form and not over extending myself.

To answer the final day three question, exercise always makes me feel accomplished and happy. I feel like my body always wants to blame every pain on my productive and joy-bringing activities like working out or playing games on my computer. I’m hoping to stay strong and breakdown this correlation that my mind has built up..