As a personal trainer, I hear people express (or accept) this popular concept without a second thought. But if you said “I practice working out,” people would be very confused.

There is something about yoga that allows us to approach it as a lifelong practice; we somehow know we can continue to improve ourselves through yoga forever, without reaching an end or conclusion. I think this has something to do with yoga’s origins in Eastern traditions. Yoga’s ancient spiritual roots seem to make people more forgiving of some of its less tangible aspects. For example, if a yoga instructor tells us that we store a lot of emotion in our hips, it may not occur to us to ask what that means or how anyone could know that. By contrast however, if a Western medical doctor shared some of the physiological specifics of running intervals or doing deadlifts, you might be tempted to ask for evidence—like solid research—that backs the claim.

I propose we start thinking about our workouts the way we think about yoga. Why? I’m glad you asked.

Internal Motivation vs. External Goals

For many people, practicing yoga has as much to do with mental and emotional goals as physical ones. Because yoga encourages the practitioner to remain present, pay attention to her or his breath, and check in with her- or him- self, yoga provides a workout for the mind as well as the body. In short, for many people, the purpose of doing yoga is doing yoga.

In stark contrast to this “the-process-is-the-product” understanding of yoga, we tend to view traditional ways of working out as a means to some other specific end. Being a trainer, I can tell you that most people work out to see aesthetic or performance improvements (and those goals are usually about creating body composition changes). Just as often, fitness is seen as a way to improve the quality of another aspect of life, like lifting luggage, playing with kids, walking up stairs, or carrying groceries. Very rarely does someone improve their fitness in order to be better at the experience of fitness.

Placing the fitness focus on external goals, as opposed to the internal experience of exercise, makes working out seem more like a chore—a step that must be accomplished to get what we really want, as opposed to an experience or a reward in and of itself. There’s nothing wrong with having external or aesthetic goals, but in my experience, most clients who are able to find true, long-term success also tend to fall in love with the process itself.

The “About-to-Die” Factor

Yoga encourages practitioners to check in with their bodies’ limitations so that poses, though potentially challenging, remain physically attainable for the practitioner without causing injury or strain. Good, old-fashioned fitness, on the other hand, currently has a terrible (and inaccurate!) rap for being so hard.

I’ve had clients complain to me after a great and productive workout that they didn’t feel like they were going to puke—as if that’s a bad thing! Marketing, media, and sports folklore would have us believe that if a workout doesn’t make us feel like we’re about to die, then we aren’t working hard enough. Aside from the fact that this is absolutely not true, it also makes the idea of working out extremely daunting and unmotivating.

There’s No Such Thing as “Right”

Add to the equation the fact that fitness has relatively recent Western roots, and you can see why we tend to be more exacting in our desire to do fitness “right.” It seems like we’re more forgiving with yoga. In fact, part of yoga’s appeal might be that because we don’t fully understand how it affects us, we can’t pursue doing it “correctly.” All we know is it’s been around for thousands of years, it challenges our bodies and minds, and it feels darn good.

But in Western science and medicine, we are taught to expect black and white answers. All my clients want to know the exact right way to do things, the exact right combination of exercises, and the exact right eating plan. I assure you: There is no such thing. But that doesn’t stop marketing and media from inundating us with claims of “scientifically proven” ways to lose weight or get shredded fast. (Insert eye roll here.)

Bonus: Meet Your Goals and Maintain Your Gains

If your goal is to get stronger, protect your joints, maintain fat loss, build lean muscle mass, increase balance and mobility, and improve your cardiovascular system, then consistency over the long term is much more important than intensity in the short term. Going really hard and then quitting for a while is the opposite of what you need.

Approaching fitness as a lifelong habit—a continuous, fluid practice—will not only protect you from things like overuse injuries and other ailments that come with doing too much too soon. It will also bring you closer to your goals and allow you to maintain the results you work so hard to achieve

Practice Makes… Even Better Practice

So why does any of this matter? Would approaching fitness as a practice actually improve anything? I think so.

For one, calling something a practice takes the pressure off doing it perfectly. What if not doing it “right,” (missing a lift, having an unexpectedly slow and difficult run, etc.) was just part of getting better at fitness? Thinking you have to do something perfectly makes it more likely you won’t do it at all. I often see clients approaching fitness with the idea that they must succeed in a specific way, and it inevitably leads to them feeling like failures—all it takes is one not-so-great workout to leave people unmotivated to try it again. On the other hand, “practicing” something seems harmless. Fun, even! I think approaching fitness as a skill to be developed and improved would increase the likelihood of people getting started, while increasing motivation for continuing.

The future of the fitness industry should be anti- fast results and anti- instant gratification. We should be approaching the weight room as a place to learn skills that we can practice and improve, month after month, year after year, forever. There is so much joy to be had in fitness, so many different ways to progress, and so much pleasure in movement and overcoming obstacles.

So, let’s start approaching fitness like we approach yoga. Let’s take our time to learn the basics before moving on to the hard stuff. Let’s aim to be constantly improving and taking on new challenges, and pushing our limits. Let’s celebrate our victories in the gym, not just on the scale, and let’s do it for the simple reward of using our bodies for something challenging and wonderful.

—Jessi Kneeland for Greatist

And that’s what the experience of overwhelm feels like–there is so much coming at you it’s hard to think straight. How can you get anything done when you’re in such a confuzzled state?

But know this: You can’t always squash overwhelm. It’s a form resistance and resistance is pretty much inevitable. Rather, you need to recognize it for what it is, accept it and learn from it. Only then can you choose a different path with grace.

Here are five secrets that will help you do just that:

1. Change Your Choice: Feeling overwhelmed is a learned behavior. I learned it from a true master–my mom. God bless her, she has numerous positive qualities, but she is also really good at working herself into a tizzy. So if overwhelm is a learned behavior that has become a habit, it is also, at some subconscious level, a choice. And that means it is possible to choose something else.
2. Get Curious: Overwhelm can sneak into a lot of different aspects of your life. Put on your Sherlock Holmes cap and get curious about the particular forms your overwhelm takes. What kinds of situations trigger it? What are the thoughts that accompany it? How does it feel in your body? How do the people you’re in relationship with react when you start feeling it? The more aware you are of your overwhelm habit, the easier it is to change.
3. Track Your Time: Once you pinpoint where overwhelm shows up in your life, then do this: Track how you spend your time. You may think you can’t do one extra thing because you’re already working 60 hours a week—but are you really? Track time and you may be shocked to learn that you are only truly working for 38 hours a week. Remember, overwhelm works by confusing you. So let this exercise help you fact check your reality.
4. Do Less: If you discover say, that you spend the majority of your Sundays doing laundry—as I did—consider sending your laundry out to the wash-n-fold—as I did and it’s amazing! Delegating effectively buys time back, time you can now spend hiking, working on your novel, teaching your kids how to cook, or whatever floats your boat. It also helps to minimize the time for overwhelming chores like tidying up the house. Can you just do one big clean-up before bed? Or ignore the mess sometimes and just get on with living your life?
5. Aim for Consistency: Figure out your “feel good” baseline. You may need 2-3 hours a week of marketing to ensure your business is humming along. Or at least 10 minutes of meditation daily to feel calm. Whatever you absolutely need to manage overwhelm, make it a priority. Stick with it even when things are going all to hell and also when things are going great. This is about being compassionate with yourself. Because it doesn’t feel good to lose momentum. In fact, it feels horrible.

With that, I’ll end with a quote from Swami Kripalu, a yoga master whose followers established the Kripalu retreat center in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts:

“It is proper to welcome struggle. It’s arrival is always auspicious. It transforms an ordinary human into a spiritually-awake person.”

Replace the word “struggle” with “overwhelm” and you start to see how powerful your decision to manage overwhelm can be!

Still need some help getting centered? Let Shiva Rae help with this 10-minute mediation practice from AcaciaTV.

—By Kate Hanley for AcaciaTV.