#FLVRfitness: Competing With Fitness & Balancing Relationships: Facing the Facts

by: Diva Dez @ilove_dez

Either you’re in a relationship with someone who adores you and your time, or you’re with someone who claims they “understand” your fit lifestyle, and that the time they crave has a difficult way of being balanced. 

The daily routine: Wake up, cardio, eat, prep your meal, work, train, relax for a couple minutes (ideally), sleep. So where does bae go? Now we can start talkin.

Speaking as a Nationally Certified Personal Trainer, Nationally Qualified NPC Fitness Competitor, and most importantly, a girlfriend to someone who is still learning my lifestyle, I am still figuring out how to properly balance my time with clients, time for my separated training, and of course, time for my loved one. I’m not going to sit here and say it gets easier, because it doesn’t. It only gets harder – if you let it. Whether you’re a competitor like me or just a gym rat who wants to transform your lifestyle into something you thought couldn’t happen, we all share that same fight with ourselves. We purchase our tickets to ride this crazy roller coaster of highs and lows, emotions and all, and in some cases it jeopardizes our relationships and makes us question ourselves. 

Common thoughts that flood our minds in the process: “What are we doing?”, “I think I’ll just be single my whole life and be fine with that”, “Why do I even do this to myself?”, “Ughhhh”, “Omfg I’m so annoyed”, (my favorite) “Smh, he just doesn’t understand”, “Can I just have abs already!?”, “I just want fucking carbs!”, or “Can you not?”. Someone asks if you want a piece of some bomb-ass, greasy pizza; you smile (so fake) and say “no thank you”, but really you want to be like, “did you really just fucking ask me bro?” And the list goes on! So back to question #1 – what’s a way to balance this lifestyle? Prioritizing.  

If anyone knows me, you’ll always see me with a shit ton of composition books, journals, note pads, etc., because I’ve found that planning my days out daily will not only decrease some stress, but improve my relationship(s). Every time the new season of competing starts, I give myself 12-16 weeks to train until show time. But before the start, my fitness switch goes from turned off and ignored, to just put on snooze. So why can’t we do that during in-season, or during our relationships? Is it too much? Do we just not care? Is having someone there just a “convenience” for the time being? Like, what is it that makes having our loved ones by our side turn into a blur for moments at a time? 

I can’t answer that for you, but my personal thought? It’s back to what I said about planning and prioritizing. If you follow me on Instagram and actually tune in to what I write in my captions, I’ve made this statement a few times: You and I both chose this life. We chose to be those extreme multitasking individuals. Chose to take on more than most can swallow. We wanted this. Therefore, it’s our responsibility to learn how to (keyword) BALANCE our dreams with our relationship(s), and we do that by prioritizing our time. If you catch yourself saying (this one’s my personal favorite) “I just don’t have enough time”, well you actually do, it just takes some sacrifices. The last time I said that was after meeting a lady I trained two years ago. She attended school, had three kids plus one teenage daughter going to college, put her kids through sports and tutoring, had to cook and clean for them and her husband who was a night time Pepsi Company driver, and STILL had time to balance out a diet at the same time!! Now tell me you don’t have time. 

So for all you busy bodies out there, you either want to make time for your current boo along with your other life, or you don’t. Feel free to comment back or reach out to team FLVR. I would love to hear you out! Thanks for reading, and stay tuned. 

#DivaDez signing off.