Type “Paradox of Choice” into Google and you will find, “The paradox of choice is an observation that having many options to choose from, rather than making people happy and ensuring they get what they want, can cause them stress and problematize decision-making.”
The paradox of choice tells us that when we have a lot of decisions to make, we feel less happy.
This is closely related to its brother, “Decision fatigue”.
There is an article called: “Decision Fatigue: What it is and how it’s killing your focus, motivation, and willpower” that may be found on the RESCUE TIME blog.
I would encourage you to read on the subject. It is interesting and may help you in other areas of life.
But if you train on the heavy bag, I can tell you with certainty: your workouts have been suffering because of decision fatigue. Too many choices (the paradox) and too many decisions made (fatigue).
For most people, the heavy bag is fun for the first several times they use it but their training routines end because of boredom, repetition, monotony, and the mental drain that goes with deciding what to do during every round.
This is where decision fatigue rears its ugly head and it’s a real drain on how much you’ll enjoy your workout.
Decision fatigue is such a detriment that people like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg decided to wear the same thing everyday just to avoid it!
Small decisions accumulate and erode your mental satisfaction.
A heavy bag workout might be made of a thousand decisions! Yuck. No wonder you thought your workout sucked. It did. Literally. It sucked your mental energy and drained your nervous system.
When you constantly have to think “What should I throw next?”, you can’t exercise in the moment.
Your brain has to always be “on the edge of its seat” trying to plan your next action.
What’s the point?
The point is you can’t start training without a thorough plan. It can’t be “in your head” either. An instructor has to tell you what it is, a video needs to be pulling you through, or an audio workout needs to be giving you your commands.
Of course, there are reasons we’re not going with those above options and instead are training powered by our unique system. (Those reasons are delineated elsewhere on the site).
(In fairness, there are some “audio workouts” that are good. I’ve tried a few out and felt I could label them “good”. But they weren’t nearly as good, or enjoyable, or as stress relieving, as the System we train on.If you become a member you will see. After I created this, I never wanted to train any other way again. Every now and then I’ll try someone else’s workout and I’m always disappointed I just didn’t do my System instead. Soooo much better. Seriously.)
When you train with the Kickboxing Underground, all you need to do is show up. Heck, you don’t even have to be in the mood. (the System takes care of that as well)
Just show up, put on your tunes, wrap up your hands, and follow along, round by round.
There are a few decisions you have to make (like what stretches your going to do), but after a while you’ll get into your own groove there and it will be very very easy to flow from one stretch to another without wracking your brain.