Working out and pain

After a long stretch of ignoring my body, I've set some goals to get in shape and feel good IN my body (I think I have a decent body to begin with, it just so happens that this sluggishness that I have makes me feel bad =P)

So here they are:

to stretch everyday

to jog/do aerobic every other day
go swimming once a month

to get massages from professionals every 3 months

to be able to do front splits within 3 months

and chinese (side) splits within 6 months

to be able to jog 10k in a year and a half

to get a black belt in 3 years

my goodness, lately I've been doing stretches and I'm just baffled at how inflexible I've become. I used to be able to touch my toes with little problem, and now it's like my body can't go past perpedicular angles.

Ridiculous.

Anyway, I was a bit zealous about this whole thing and while I was stretching today I actually almost cried from the stretch. Some people say that jogging until you fallover seems like a masochistic thing to do, but try stretching beyond your limit. It is frikking the most painful thing in the world (short of child-birth, but then again, that is another type of stretching in itself....)

I tried to hold in my expression, but I realized that venting this expression - actually making pained faces - actually increased my tolerance to this pain. The more I expressed this pain, the longer I could take it.

This might be the reason why women have higher tolerances to pain - we just express our pain physically~

It's like breathingt I suppose.

The pain is like the carbon in your body - and if you try to hold it in, well you'll just feel like exploding -

but breathe it out, and this carbon can continually course through your body naturally... the pain can continually course through your body... at safer more tolerable amounts

Isn't that crazy? I wonder why expression is just so important to renewing our bodily and mental health...

Any thoughts?

Anyway, I've learned that I'm not supposed to stretch until I feel pain... only until 'mild discomfort', else I'm going to injure myself! I already feel that sharp pain on knees... if only I'd read that earlier!

Then again, I wouldn't have come to this observation... which is really cool.

Actually, I'm starting to like psychology again - this course, neuroeconomics, really shows how fascinatingly complex we are...

we really don't have humans all figured out, at least not our internal workings. The 'why' business has often been left to philosophers who can't really prove their point. Go psychology and the scientific method!!