I was told a saying in Italy during a particularly hard Crossfit workout. It’s funny, because it describes moment in working out that often isn’t addressed, but if you regularly do high intensity training you’ve likely felt it.

The phrase is for that moment just after you’ve started working out and your feeling like this whole workout is going to be impossible. Maybe you feel a bit weak, a bit sluggish, not fully warmed up yet, and just generally like you’re on set 1 of 10 and that 10th set seems way too far away. Here’s what someone told me to do.

‘Break your breath’

This was new to me, but it basically means control your breathing so that you can continue with a rhythm, you can get in to the groove of your training. Finding your rhythm in high intensity workouts is always going to be challenging, but there’s a big difference between every set destroying your body and the whole workout feeling like an impossible task, as opposed to that feeling of it being challenging but with the right amount of effort. In the groove.

It’s such an interesting observation as the more my training, my work, my travels become self motivated, I find this very same moment appearing in other areas of life.

That moment when you sit down to work and you jump between procrastinating and trying to do massive stints of work right up to a deadline.

That moment where you put off making a decision that will effect your travels until you have to rush all of them.

Often times if you’d started early you could ‘break your breath’ on these tasks. You could find that rhythm of what you needed to do if you just got past that uncomfortable first minute.

You have to blow out your lungs, fire up your muscles, get the blood moving first.

This bit sucks.

This is you going from sedentary to active again and your breath responds with scattered breathing.

So, break your breath.

If you relax in to the rhythm then anything, from a workout to a project task, then it can become a smooth process.

It’s almost like 50% of the effort needed to do something is in the first minute. If you can muster the power to smash the first wall, whether starting a task, making that decision, or doing that first set, then your body responds by making the next step seem a lot easier than it used to be.

Break through the mindset that stops you from doing what needs to be done. Start the workout, make the decision, begin the project.

As soon as you begin everything will seem a lot smoother,.

Break your breath first, then let it happen.