Hi friends!
As I prepared a video for this week’s #firstfruitfriday I felt God tell me to “train the unseen muscles”. Bear with me as I geek out on you with a little exercise science.
Have you ever noticed that most of us train the front of our body the majority of the time? The most popular exercises you see performed are pushups, planks, crunches, bicep curls and lunges. It just so happens that all of those moves primarily work the front of your body. It’s no surprise that we care so much about those body parts because those are the ones WE see!
The problem with this type of frontal focused training is that we leave our back side weak and subject to injury. Most of us are in the hunched forward position all day(like I am currently as I type this post) so we are chronically too tight on the front and overstretched and weak on the back side. I don’t think you need to be an exercise physiologist to see the problem with this picture. The longer this imbalance occurs the more prone you are to injury, thus giving up on your workout routine thinking you can’t do it without getting injured.
The Lord has been reminding me how this principle is true for our spiritual walk. We all have the tendency to be strong in one area and extremely weak in another. The problem with this spiritual training is that we have an enemy of our soul who sits by like a lion waiting to pounce on our weak link. Do you struggle to read the Bible? Stay in fellowship with other believers? Pray at all times? Worship in all circumstances? Steward your time and finances well? Whatever your weak link may be, the enemy knows it, and if you look at your life you may see that you tend to get attacked in that same area.
I feel God beckoning us, to train our weak, and unseen, areas. But to train them you must first get honest about what those weaknesses are both physically and spiritually.
Take a look at your workouts. Do you focus only on cardio and no strength? Or vice versa? Do you include flexibility training? When you do strength training, are you only focused on a few body parts and not the unseen yet important muscle groups?
Take a look at your spiritual and mental health. Do you read the Bible daily? Do you pray continually? How are you stewarding your finances and time? Are you renewing your mind with God’s word?
Once you see where your weakness is, take a moment to make a game plan. For your workout, I’ve included a short, 10 minute low impact workout that you can do at home using nothing but old rags or paper plates. The beauty of these moves is that they train unseen muscles(like your erector spinae muscles that line your spine and transverse abdominis muscles which are your built in girdle). You can do this workout 2-3 times a week to get a really strong base and to train the muscles that often get overlooked.
Then make a game plan for your spiritual walk. Find a Bible reading program, get into a life group at your church, take a course(like Financial Peace University) to learn how to better steward your resources.
While training the unseen muscles is not always easy it is always worth it! And it leads us toward being a whole person, mind, soul, body and spirit!
Enjoy this workout!
