Coming to love exercise

The fate of quitting sport during puberty is something that affects so many teen girls (64% of girls quit regular sport by the age of 16); I also notice this in academically focused people or those that are not as physically capable as their peers. It's because of linking enjoyment and competence, bad education around fitness, group effects / gender-based exclusion, priorities, and many other factors. This makes me very sad, it's clear that everyone can greatly benefit from exercise.

I was definitely initially on a path of quitting exercise / hating it. As a kid, I did whatever exercise happened in school, and I hated exercise because I was naturally worse than my peers at it (I was overweight, younger than everyone, female in the first half of school). In tennis classes I never progressed and drills felt like punishment. I dropped out of most sports by the time I was 13/14 except for the weekly casual PE classes in my girl's school in London.

When I was 15 my dad took me to the gym for the first time. He helped me a lot, but I still didn't feel confident enough to keep it up. I felt clumsy in my body. After a few months the pandemic came, and I entered into Youtube workout hell: chloe ting abs, joe wicks hiit workouts, 'couch to 5k': viral stuff you could do at home/in the park. These were not fun: they were lonely and not effective due to lack of consistency in workouts. It's good to get moving, but seeing progress would have made me stick with it. I also now know I prefer planning my own workouts to following a video/class. Bad self-image + wanting to lose weight and then not actually losing weight via exercise made me dislike it even more.

In the summer of 2023, I went to the gym again with Agniv and Brady at PAIR! They made it feel fun and social: they helped me bench for the first time. We laughed, we failed, we succeeded. I was convinced that the gym could be fun. Being strong would be nice too...

I joined university in October that year, and started working out regularly in my college's gym. Matt, one of my Oxford friends, gave me a lot of form advice, and recommended the app 'Alpha Progression' (lol) which I still use to plan and track all my workouts. But for that academic year, I was often sick with a mysterious long cough and cold (I never got a diagnosis after many tests and treatments) which stunted my consistency at the gym, and made me very sad that I couldn't keep up with it. In the second year of university, I got back into the gym, but in taking on a lot of work and projects and travel, I wasn't very consistent (but worked to build consistency!). The gym started being a fun practice even by myself. In 2024 I strength trained 94 times!

Now it's the end of 2025. Earlier this year, I made a set of strength / fitness goals for the indefinite future. I thought these goals were very ambitious when I set them, but I made so much progress on them in the last 8 months:

• do a pull-up (I can pull myself like 3/4 of the way up, at the beginning of the year I couldn't really even hang off the bar. I think I'll get here in 1-2 months!)
• do 10 push-ups (I can do this!)
• do a pistol squat (I can do 4!)
• become a healthy weight (I lost 7 kg this summer and am at 29% body fat. ~2 years ago I was 34%. I could be a lot leaner but I'm happy to finally be within healthy ranges!)
• run 5k in 30 minutes (I recently reached 31! Earlier this year I couldn't even run 5k without walking parts of it. I think I'll break 30 minutes in a few weeks!)

There have been many qualitative wins too:

• I learned to feel better mind-muscle connection with my upper body, which really accelerated my progress and enjoyment (thanks Dad)
• I am not sick as often or as badly (as a result of being more fit too and being more mindful about resting).
• I thoroughly enjoy running! I have never even slightly enjoyed it until last month. Finishing a run was always nice, but now I like the journey too!
• I feel confident in my body, less clumsy. There are few skills that feel impossible to learn: this feeling is truly freeing and wonderful.

These experiences in the last two years have brought me to really enjoy exercise. I do something active most days, and I'm optimistic about new physical experiences and challenges. I wish for everybody to feel this joy towards exercise that I feel: the physical and mental rewards are undeniable. I feel like I've tapped into something I was missing my whole life.

I reread a post of mine from the beginning of this year, and a lot of the advice is pretty solid. Here are some of those ideas updated to match my current beliefs.

On enjoying movement

For most of my life, I did sports 'because it's good/I have to' or 'to lose weight'. These are not very good reasons because they are not things that I genuinely want deep down. Your subconscious doesn't think about aesthetics or social norms. It thinks about being happy. It thinks about having fun. It feels more natural (and so it is easier to motivate yourself) if you intend to do exercise for more 'whole' reasons: to feel better, to spend time with people doing the same activity, to be able to experience more of life.

That said, it's okay to have goals driven by insecurity. Lying to yourself is hard, and insecurities can be motivating. But know that this sets you up for eventually losing the motivation when exercise doesn't fix your insecurities the way you expected it to, or as fast as you wanted. If you have other goals as well, you'll have motivation that persists (and is more positive-- they say the carrot is stronger than the stick), and in the long run you'll probably overcome your insecurity through consistency. (thanks Nick for prompting this)

It's also important to find something you really enjoy doing. When I was ~13 my dad first showed me the basics of lifting, but it took revisiting it at 17 with my friends to get into it. Trial and error helps, but I'm not sold that this is the best way to make new hobbies. Perhaps find the crux of your other hobbies: do you like doing things with other people? Do you like making something real? Do you like achieving smaller sub-tasks? Do you like working towards a goal for ages? Are you competitive? Do you like to see numbers go up? Do you like skills that are genuinely useful? Do you like to learn skills you can show off/perform? There is probably a physical activity for you.

I really do believe that in many situations, repetition can bring enjoyment. Perhaps it's familiarity and routine, perhaps it's advancement and achievement, but even if you don't enjoy exercise at first, try it for longer than you usually would. Iterate within exercise (do it with/without people, at different times of day, different intensities, with/without music). It's possible that over time, you develop love for exercise. Give it a (more than) fair shot!

Seek a personal trainer, or a kind friend, who can show you the tricks, course-correct you when you're making rookie mistakes, and make the experience a lot more fun & social. Also as Jason notes, someone like a personal trainer can make exercise much less mentally taxing: you just show up and do what they tell you to do, and you don't have to worry about doing the right or wrong thing, too much or too little, etc.

Optimising

There's loads of internet content on exercise tips and hacks, so here are the main life changers for me that I discovered empirically or by someone teaching me in person.

• Run experiments yourself. Try different supplements and diets and gym routines. Research exists but nutrition/exercise science has no truths: your body is unique
• If you have a weekly goal of n workouts, schedule n + 1
• Pack your bag + lay out workout clothes the night before so that you wake up and know you have to go to the gym
• Pick progress metrics that are simple and reliably improving. For example, improvement in weight/volume in weightlifting reliably improves more than body weight loss (which is affected by loads of other factors). This will keep you motivated. Some people prefer not to track stuff.
• Logging emotions and whether I exercised (on Apple Health for example) showed me that exercise has a HUGE impact on how I feel, this is motivating!
• Read/watch/consume content on your sport of choice! It helps generate intellectual interest in it, you feel part of some kind of community, you feel like you know what you're doing
• The app Alpha Progression for tracking weightlifting
• Feeling muscles while doing an exercise was something I really had to intentionally learn. Only in the last 1-2 months can I say that I know what feeling my pecs is like (it's been almost 2 years of lifting). Getting someone advanced to help you with this is really helpful. If you can't do that, the main thing is to try activation exercises (moves that make you squeeze the muscle intentionally under light load) and different positions for standard lifts to see what works best for your muscles
  • for chest, for me, this looks like trying different bench angles, doing push-ups on dumbbells and holding the bottom position, and doing pec flies
  • for back, this looked like a session where I tried bent over rows and lat pull down in many different grips and angles on repeat, trying to note where I felt it each time. My favourite back exercise is now a single arm lat pulldown because the range of motion is huge
  • I never had issues with lower body activation but I think learning to deep squat, engaging the glutes, learning to 'break parallel' in squats
• Stick to a plan week after week: don't change the exercises you do frequently
• Go easy on yourself, listen to your body. But consistency also comes by showing up when you don't feel like it. Pushing through feelings of discomfort is the core of becoming stronger mentally and physically.
• Do your other basics well: eat, sleep, sunlight, water. Try to travel/change your routine less. Avoid getting sick as much as possible.

I love taking my friends and my mom to the gym and teaching them how to lift weights. I also love going with people who know more and getting feedback and tips. If you're friends with me, let's go to the gym together!