Just move! It’s simple, right? It should be, but we find that most people just don’t do it anywhere near as much as we need to. If it were so simple as this, then so many of us wouldn’t be so sedentary as we are.
Is it because we see the recommended exercise limit, and it becomes this undesirable chunk of a thing. Like taking medicine, that’s gross but you know you have to. Maybe you’ll skip it that day.
Is it because we think we are far too busy and can’t ‘fit’ exercise in. That’s a good lie we tell ourselves.
Sometimes we see exercise as this big burdensome thing rather than the liberating thing that it is. And it’s this part of the exercise conundrum I want to talk about today.
Exercise is not big and confronting, or it needn’t be. It feels that way because many of us are at the bottom. We think we need to do something big when really what we need to do is do ‘small’ often. After a while of doing small often, we can move to a little more and progress, all the while enjoying what we are doing and how it feels.
If you go big, too soon, the chances you may fail increase. Bootcamps and any other tough 30 day (like) program sound good in theory, but if you go from zero to 100 in 24hrs, you’re going to be in for a lot of pain.
Yeah, yeah, no pain = no gain, I hear you say. This sets us up for the wrong ideas about exercise. We should enjoy exercise. Not just because of the exercise endorphins, but because of the activity we are doing, that we find we like.
I’ve heard people say they don’t enjoy any type of exercise. This is a sign that you have 1 or maybe 2 things going on.
- Mindset: Exercise is to be endured not enjoyed
- You haven’t found or spent enough time with exercise to enjoy it.
So what do you do?
Start small.
Do small often.
And commit to just that. In starting small you give yourself some space to discover what you like, don’t and explore what is going on in your head regarding exercise.
This means different things for you than it does for me. We all have different limitations. And you need to know what areas of your body are vulnerable and build them up.
In starting small, you start with maybe just 10-15 minutes of movement. That is achievable every day. If you think it isn’t then you need to go back to your mindset and ideas around exercise.
For a little bit of an idea of what starting small looks like take a look at my ‘start small’ plan.
