South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
When the last thing you want to do is exercise
Being flexible and making it a priority will motivate you to go out for that run
I was so tempted to skip the run. It was a Thursday afternoon in early December, and by the time my five Zoom meetings were done, it was getting dark and the sky was spitting sleet. Still, I headed out the door, because my last call of the day had been with a couple of professional runners, each with multiple national championship titles in distance running under their belt. Physician Megan Roche and her husband, David, had encouraged me to think of my workout as recess after a long day of work, rather than another item on my to-do list.
“I struggle with motivation all the time,” David Roche said. What gets him over the hump is finding joy in the activity itself. Sometimes it helps to get a little silly, he said. “It sounds ridiculous, but if you’re running down a slight hill or even just tired, put your arms out like you’re an airplane and suddenly everything become less serious.”
It did sound silly, but when I tried the airplane arms trick, my dark, cold run became surprisingly joyful. Here are some other ways you can find inspiration in your daily workout.
Don’t think of it as exercise.
When exercise isn’t appealing, making it feel like something else can help. Crystal Steltenpohl, a psychologist at the University of Southern Indiana, Evansville, who studies exercise motivation, recalled a conversation she had with a participant in one of her studies who said, “I go play basketball, but that’s just hanging out with friends.” In other words, although the activity qualified as exercise, that was just a fringe benefit, rather than the motivating factor.
I spent years as a competitive runner, cyclist and skier. And while I continue to do these activities, I usually get the recommended 22 minutes per day of moderate-intensity exercise automatically, without ever thinking about exercise. Instead, I do my morning walk to clear my head and feel present in my surroundings.
“If you ask, most people will say they want to exercise for their health, and that’s a great goal,” said Katie Heinrich, an exercise scientist at Kansas State University. “But what gets people actually moving is doing something they enjoy.” There’s no perfect activity for everyone. “How do you like to move?” Heinrich said. “Maybe it’s dancing, or it could be a walk in the park. For some people, it might be CrossFit or Peloton.”
Casey Johnston stumbled upon weight lifting through a Reddit thread by a woman starting a strength-training program. That post inspired Johnston, a health and science writer who now publishes the newsletter She’s a
Beast, to try a similar program. She discovered that she loved it much more than running. Whereas running gave her too much time to ruminate over anxious thoughts, “You can’t think of anything else when you have 200 pounds on your back,” she said.
Bundle your incentives.
Last month, researchers published a megastudy testing the effectiveness of 54 approaches to motivating people to exercise more. The experiment, which enlisted more than 60,000 members of the 24 Hour Fitness chain as test subjects, found that offering a free audiobook was one of the most effective ways to get people to the gym. The idea was to give participants something to look forward to while exercising, said one of the study’s organizers, Katy Milkman, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and author of the book “How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be.”
It’s an approach familiar to Megan Roche. She enjoys taking photographs, and running gives her an opportunity to look for interesting things to shoot. “These photos carry me through my running journey,” she said.
Make exercise a priority.
“The No. 1 reason people give for not exercising is time,” Heinrich said, and the only reliable way to find the time is to prioritize it. “You have to make a decision to put exercise into your day; it’s not just magically going to happen.”
Johnston used to try and squeeze exercise into her life by doing things like taking the stairs instead of the elevator, “But that never really stuck or gave me any validation that I was doing anything meaningful,” she said. “Giving exercise a distinct place in my life was motivating.”
If you think of exercise as optional, you give yourself permission to skip it. Instead, try thinking of it as an essential part of your job, said Brad Stulberg, author of “The Practice of Groundedness” and a frequent writer about human performance. “Whether you are a parent, business person, physician, writer, artist, lawyer or educator, exercise will make you better at what you do,” he said.
“It will help you focus, stay calm and collected, and improve your energy.”
Be flexible.
Making exercise a priority does not mean you need a rigid schedule. A study Milkman and some colleagues published in 2020 found that giving yourself flexibility to meet your goals might boost your chance of success. Researchers studied more than 2,500 Google employees, randomly assigning some of them to get paid for going to the company gym during a window of time they had identified in advance as the most manageable, while others could opt to go anytime.
The researchers had expected that committing to specific times would help people form stronger habits, said lead author John Beshears, a behavioral economist at Harvard Business School. Instead, the people who had been given flexibility ended up going more often after the payments ended. When the group on the rigid program missed their planned workout, they didn’t go at all, whereas the group that had practiced finding the time continued to do so, Milkman said.
Anticipate how exercise will make you feel.
It is tempting to think you are too stressed or tired to exercise, but exercise is exactly what you need to feel better. “You don’t need to feel good to get going, you need to get going to feel good,” Stulberg said.
Exercise can help you manage your moods, Steltenpohl said, and when you are feeling lousy, sometimes exercise is a powerful antidote. “When I get really frustrated, I find that’s a good time to take a walk.”
Johnston is motivated by how her workouts feel. “I really enjoy how it feels physically to use my muscles and do one concrete task,” she said.
She is also urged on by the progress she achieves through weightlifting. “It’s impossible to make people understand the feeling of getting stronger, especially when they’re new at it,” Johnston said. It’s a benefit that happens pretty quickly, she said, and it can create a positive feedback loop.