I’m not that ‘fit’, but in the last year and a bit, I went from hating exercise to loving it and doing it as much as I can. I have a long way to go, but I’ve learned some things which, after talking to Jason and Cath about this, might be worth writing up.
step 1: find something you love, and make sure it’s for a good reason
For most of my childhood I did sports ‘because it’s good/I have to’ or I ran ‘to lose weight’. These are not very good reasons because they are not things that I genuinely want for myself deep deep down. The brain doesn’t think about aesthetics or social norms. It thinks about being happy. It feels more natural (and so 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.
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 going to a summer camp at 17 (PAIR) where friends would go to the gym together, which showed me it could be social and fun and not competitive. Other things I’ve tried include tennis, running, cycling, climbing, but I don’t love them yet.
step 2: stick to it
Now you have to keep doing the thing you like for a long long time. Which sounds much easier than it is. Willpower is not reliable. Here are some things that help me get over the lack of willpower (some are morning-workout specific):
- if you have a weekly goal of workouts, schedule
- speaking of scheduling, do schedule it especially if you have a complex/tight schedule
- pack your bag + lay out workout clothes the night before so that you wake up and know you have to go to the gym
- plan to go with a friend. other forms of accountability work too but this is the most fun
- find progress metrics that are simple and reliably increasing. for example, improvement in weight/volume in weightlifting reliably improves more than weight loss (which is affected by loads of other factors)
- logging emotions and whether I exercised (on apple health for example) showed me that exercise has a HUGE impact on how I feel so I use that to motivate me
- see if many shorter workouts or fewer longer workouts work better for you
- listen to fitness podcasts/youtube (hesitant to recommend because of the amount of fake stuff on the internet) so that it becomes a more academic interest of yours and then it’s fun to learn things about fitness
- I was subscribed to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s newsletter for a while which was quite motivating
- Also Andrew Huberman has a lot of interesting info on exercise/health/productivity (it’s a good start to understand the basics, but if I find if I get into the details, it can be a bit much/make me feel like I’m doing everything wrong)
- Stronglifts has great resources for lifters to learn proper form (and the 5x5 plan is awesome)
step 3: optimise for progress
A lot of my takes here are weightlifting specific but they might be applicable in other forms of exercise too
- stick to a plan week after week: don’t change the exercises you do frequently
- most lifting exercises have a period where you are learning form, and only after that do you start to build muscle and see strength gains that are not from stability/learning
- alpha progression is a fantastic app to keep track of weight and reps over time for lifters!
- do your other basics well: eat, sleep, sunlight, water
- in particular I’m focused on getting enough protein and taking creatine. this makes recovery + gains much better, which helps me stay consistent
- don’t get sick: lots of protocols for this (this was the resource that changed it for me after 6+ months of mysterious Oxford sickness)
- travel less so you can stick to your routine
step 4: repeat steps 1-3?
I’m still working on this, but I think in the future I’ll want to be more ambitious and try new things which are currently out of my comfort/happy zone (rowing, calisthenics, multi-day hiking, climbing). I think this will have the same kind of discovery ⇒ consistency ⇒ optimisation loop as weightlifting did. I’ll let you know when I get there!