i don’t want to exercise today
"When you don’t want to work out is when you need it the most." - Lauren Gleisberg
If I had a nickel for every time I’ve thought to myself, "I don’t want to exercise today," I’d be able to retire. I could power through most of those days with brute willpower for a while. Sometimes I’d give in after six or eight weeks. Sometimes I could hold out for six months or longer. But before The Experiment, the thought of "I don’t wanna exercise today" eventually overpowered my willpower to be consistent. It was just a matter of time. This was my pattern for decades.
What Happened When I Chose Not to Work Out
I’ve touched on this briefly in my other posts, but because of how important this subject is, I thought it deserved more attention. Honestly, I can’t think of anything more important, as far as exercising goes, than the decision to keep going or not.
I remember vividly the thoughts that would wear me down until I eventually said, "Fuck it." Things like: I don’t wanna drive to the gym. Sleeping in will do me more good than exercising anyway. I did enough at work today. I’m going home and relaxing. And on and on.
It was kind of incredible how I could use excuses to make skipping a day feel okay. Looking back, I was both the con artist and the one being conned.
"The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It is the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit." - James Clear
One missed workout wasn’t the problem for me. The problem was that it was twice as easy to miss the second day. And so on. It just gets easier and easier to keep missing.
It never took long for the new habit of not exercising to take over. Then, before I knew it, weeks and months would pass. Next came the weight gain that I would start to notice. That’s usually when the first thought of "I gotta get back to the gym" would pop into my head. Then discouragement and frustration would set in because I thought I just didn’t have what it took to be consistent.
Eventually, I would get back in the gym, and the cycle would start all over again.
I always knew that the choice to exercise was a good one. But it took me too long to realize the incredible power of the choice not to.
I didn’t break that cycle by becoming a completely different person. I broke that cycle by making some simple changes, not just in how I exercised, but in how I felt about exercising.
Why I'm Making Better Choices Now
When I decided to take the gym completely out of the equation, I thought to myself, "Really, Kevin, how the hell are you going to get in shape without the gym? Who does that?"
It came down to what I was willing to do, and also what I wasn't willing to do. I wasn't willing to spend a lot of time. Taking the gym out of the equation really helped because I could roll out of bed, stretch out, do a couple of minutes of exercise, and be done before I would have even gotten to the gym.
That's when my thoughts and feelings about exercising began to change. It wasn't such a huge pain in my ass anymore. Gradually, I started to realize, "I got this."
Choosing to exercise isn’t just about me.
Something else that might sound counterintuitive, but was important to me, was admitting to myself that I don't love exercising. I never have, and I probably never will, and that's okay. Finally, being able to stop wasting mental energy on trying to convince myself that I was like those folks - God love 'em - who get so excited and pumped up about hitting the gym. That works for them, and that's great, but I'm a square peg that ain't fittin' into that round hole.
Making things easier - taking the gym out of the equation, doing shorter workouts, and being honest with myself - makes the decision whether to exercise or not easier. Which makes consistency easier. And for me, that was huge.
The bottom line is that I'm not any more motivated than I used to be. I don't love exercising more than I used to either. I've just found a way to make things easy enough to make better choices more often.
Motivation Is Fleeting - Don't Rely on It
Don't get me wrong, motivation is great when you have it. Use it when it's there. But for me, it's sort of like a nice warm bath; it cools over time.
I've wasted too much time waiting to get motivated. And too many times, I've let motivation, or the lack of it, be the reason for my lack of consistency over the years.
I've found that trying to build a consistent exercise routine on motivation is like building a home on a sandy hillside. It's only a matter of time before it all goes sideways.
There has never been a time in my life when I didn't feel like exercising, did it anyway, and then said to myself, "I wish I hadn't done that." Never. For me, most of the time, I've got to go get the motivation. In other words, I've got to exercise first, especially when I don't want to; then the motivation comes. Motivation comes for the rest of my day because I just killed it by exercising when I didn't want to. Motivation for tomorrow comes because I've proven to myself that I am the one in control, not something fleeting like motivation.
The things I've grown to rely on that aren't fleeting are my routine and my habits. Those two things are my rocks. Those are what get me through the days when "I don't want to exercise today."
You Don't Have to Do a Full Workout
There are some days when the birds are singing, the sky is so beautiful that all seems well in the universe, and I'm raring to go. I squeeze out a couple of extra push-ups, and I'm running a bit late for work because I just didn't want to get off my bike. These days are easy. Wouldn't it be nice if they were all like that? We'd all have eight-pack abs.
Then there's the other 98.9 percent of the time. Most days it's just kind of meh. You know, when everything's just okay. Some of those days, when I get started, it turns out great. Once I get going, my energy rises, my attitude gets a little better, and a confident calmness washes over me because I feel good about what I'm doing. The birds might not be singing, but I've turned a meh day into a pretty good one.
And then there are days when I'm not quite feeling it. My workout isn't great. To be honest, it's half-assed. Not only did I not squeeze out a couple of extra push-ups, but I didn't do as many as I could have if I had given it a hundred percent.
These are some of the best workouts I've had. I know how that might sound. You might be thinking, "Hey Kevin, lay off the weed; it's scrambling your brain." But in the old days, I very easily could have skipped that day. I would have thought, "What's the point in half-assing it?" I've learned that a half-assed workout day is way better than a skipped day. Not just because of what I did during the workout, but because the fact that I did anything at all was a win. I got the physical benefits and, more importantly, the mental benefits. In other words, I was building a habit.
What I Do When I Really Don't Feel Like Exercising
"Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit." - Vince Lombardi
It's funny how attitudes can change so quickly from one day to the next. And by funny, I mean it pretty much sucks. One day I'm on top of the world, another is fine, and yet another might be a bit of a struggle.
Then there are days when my give-a-shit is just flat-out broken. Days when I feel like calling in sick to work and filling my day with a whole bunch of nothing. And buried in my subconscious is an old-school Rolodex of excuses and rationalizations ready to make it really easy for me to skip a day of exercising.
What I've learned to do here is get real with myself. For me, this is almost always a self-talk issue. Some of it is easily recognized, and some isn't, but I know from experience that, for whatever reason, my self-talk has gone off the rails.
I've learned that fighting it is a waste of time and energy. If I try to fight the thoughts of "I don't want to exercise today, to hell with it, just skip today and start back up on Monday," etc., that is a battle I will most certainly lose.
So what do I do? Nothing. What I mean is, I recognize what's going on with my self-talk and leave it be. It's been my experience that just recognizing it and letting it be takes some of its power away.
Then I rely on the routine and habits I've built to get me through it. My go-to on days like this is to go for a walk. Why? Because it's the easiest exercise for me to do when I'm in this state of mind. I do a quick stretch of the hamstrings, and I make an agreement with myself that I'm going for a quick walk and then I'm done. And that's exactly what I do.
I'm convinced that these types of days are the ones that have helped me build an identity. An identity that says this is who I am now. An identity that says fuck the self-talk; I'm doing something anyway.
Summary
"The hardest part is over. You showed up." - Jess Sims
Here's the thing: if you're anything like me, you're going to have days when you want to exercise and days when you don't. The trick I finally figured out was to not let how I felt on any particular day make the decision for me.
I'm a firm believer that motivation can be a big problem. It’s a fair-weather friend at best. It's there for us on those sunny days, but when the rain comes, it's nowhere to be found. Absolutely use it when it's there, but don't count on it.
The bottom line for me is just to show up. I swear that is 99% of the battle. It's amazing the good things that happen when I simply show up.
In my humble opinion, you don't need a perfect workout every day. Do a half-assed one when you're not feeling it. Do a shitty one when you're really not feeling it. Because in my book, showing up is a huge win.