PSA: Valentine’s Day is almost here! Are you ready?
Your partnership may or may not celebrate Valentine’s Day, but whether you do or don’t, you’ll find the info below very useful.
In the next 2 minutes, you’re going to see how working out with your partner can help you break through plateaus, increase your sex appeal, and help control your appetite!
Wait! Who Should I Workout With?
I’m mainly talking about the benefits of working out with a partner/spouse. But if that just isn’t an option available to you right now, then join a group workout! There are SO many benefits you can still gain by surrounding yourself with a class full of people looking to hit goals similar to yours.
Appetite Control
How in the heck does working out with your partner have anything to do with your appetite?
It’s well documented that one of the benefits of partnered workouts is increased levels of dopamine, the pleasure neurotransmitter. It’s the feel-good chemical your body releases in certain situations….like snacking.
Snacking on junk food is a way to bump up those dopamine levels, which is partly why giving into your cravings feels SOOO good (at first). The trick here is to replace bad habits that raise dopamine with good habits that do the same. Working out with your loved one is a much healthier way to receive the same dose of dopamine and that in turn helps your body to stop craving snacks so much.
Break Through Plateaus
Your first plateau is hard to deal with. Before it, everything is going better than ever! You’re making progress, earning serious results, and you’re feeling like you’ve finally hit your stride…then BAM, it all stops.
Results become wayy more difficult to earn, the scale stops changing, and you feel stuck. This is a crucial moment. Many give up on their program, some stick with it and succeed. But having a workout partner to help you refocus on your goals definitely makes it more likely that you won’t give up.
Breaking through a plateau requires working harder on your nutrition & exercise programming. You’ll need to make changes to the program itself, improve your intensity, and get stricter. Having the emotional and motivational support of your partner will help immensely here.
Increase Sex Appeal
Thinner isn’t sexier, but happier is. So whether your goal is to get stronger, increase your endurance, lose weight, or gain weight, making progress gives you a sense of accomplishment. You’ll feel more confident, grounded, and more content. All of this has been linked to increased attractiveness.
There’s also an interesting study that shows that our brains can confuse the physical effects of exercise (sweat, rapid pulse, shortness of breath) with the effects of sexual arousal (Dutton & Aron, 1974). So for many of us, getting hot & sweaty while working out with your partner is a recipe for affection!
There are many more benefits to working out with your partner. If you’re debating whether or not to try it, think about this: if exercise is a large and important part of your life, it would probably be best to include the person you’re sharing your life with! You may find that, together, you can achieve more than you thought possible.
Dutton, D. G., & Aron, A. P. (1974). Some evidence for heightened sexual attraction under conditions of high anxiety. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 30, 510-517.
