Did anyone here used to hate exercise and learned to not hate it?
I am M41 with Asperger. One of my perennial struggles is physical exercise. If I exercised more it would probably keep me healthier especially in my old age, and it would help with a bunch of physical tasks and perhaps even improve my mental health.
But I hate it.
The stock advice is to “find a kind of exercise that you enjoy”. I have tried that with no success. I have tried weight lifting in a gym, karate, capoeira, cycling, burpees, rowing machine at home, and running, and I quickly grew to hate all of them.
The best option I have found so far is walking. Whenever reasonably convenient I will walk instead of taking a bus or the bike. (On slightly longer trips I also try to take the bike instead of the car.) This gives me a few hours of walking per week, which is better than nothing.
I am weak and awkward but otherwise in perfectly good physical health. I am naturally skinny and do not gain weight no matter what I do or eat. This is good, but it also means I have no short-term incentives to exercise, and that makes it even harder to convince myself to do it. (During those times when I did exercise more, I did not notice any mental benefits, so I am skeptical of those kinds of claims.)
Now, I am not very interested in hearing from people who easily found a kind of exercise that they enjoyed. Their advice will probably not be very applicable. I am interested in hearing whether anyone faced the same problems that I do and found a solution.
Does anyone here have a similar story and a successful outcome?
Yes, running. I hated it and never did it. Then randomly one day, I got the idea of going for the slowest jog I could. Grandpa jogging is how I think of it. People talk about “zone 1,” but they also have pretty different perceptions of what constitutes “zone 1,” so I don’t find it a very helpful term.
I go grandpa jogging over short enough distances that I don’t get cramps and don’t get exhausted. Then I feel accomplishment, which is nice. It gets me interested in how consistently I can jog and how far I can go without cramping up and getting exhausted.
Unfortunately, my experience suggests you shouldn‘t expect widespread appreciation for this among athletes. My experience is that my approach is unusual among people who actually practice, even if there‘s some science backing it up from a healthy and motivation psychology perspective.
The vibe of the athletes I know mostly seem to be people who are highly motivated by competition and accomplishment, even if they wouldn’t admit it explicitly. They enjoy being around people with the same energy, and they feel motivated by striving for personal bests and race preparation.
If you haven’t tried rock climbing you should give it a try. It’s been more mentally stimulating for me than most other physical activities. If you like puzzles and problem solving it will be a good fit, it’s basically trying to solve puzzles with your body. The rewards of progress are also quite motivating to do exercise that directly benefits your performance in climbing.
Katja Grace has a recent blog post from that genre: How I love running.
For my part, I have never hated exercise, but I would sure do it much less if not for a longstanding policy that I never watch media (TV shows, movies, youtube, etc) for fun alone, except while exercising (exercise bike, stair-stepper, elliptical, etc). And I have an endless backlog of highly-addictive trashy media that I really want to watch, and that nobody else wants to watch with me.
Yes, But I can’t exactly recommend my approach. I wrote it up here
What I’d recommend instead is to wire a different motivation you do naturally have to exercise. E.g.:
hanging out with that one athletic friend
numbers go up reward on whatever exercise feels most rewarding
learn to do something physically demanding that you will enjoy once you get there, like acrobatics or building a shed in your backyard by hand
create games or events that involve exercise
Or, you know, try to unlock the reward signal like I did for running. I have no clue how reproducible that is though.
Good luck! ❤️
Other commenters have some ideas for how to make exercise enjoyable. Another possibility is to optimize for making exercise short:
Do high-intensity intervals once a week, for 15–30 minutes. Example: 5 intervals of 30 seconds sprinting + 1 minute walking. Long-duration exercise is better, but interval exercise is more time-efficient.
Do a full-body weight routine once a week. You can see strength gains with only one heavy set per muscle group per week. Should take less than 30 minutes to do three exercises (e.g. squats + bench press + pull-ups / machine pull-downs).
That’s less than an hour of exercise per week, but it’s enough to give you a solid base.
Walking and biking to places you need to get to sounds like you are already picking the low hanging fruit. I don’t hate sports, but I find most sports (including all you mentioned) boring. I like most sports that involve chasing some ball (like badminton, tennis, squash). I’d maybe try badminton or something like that in your case and find someone you know to play with you or join some club if you are open to that. I assume you would already know if you like any of those, but you didn’t explicitly mention any of that so seemed worth asking. If you don’t like the social aspect have you considered ball juggling? The skill gain can be fun (managing to do more and more catches with more objects is easy to quantify progress) and equipment is cheap and I am sure there are tutorials online. For the same reason I like bouldering because it includes puzzles. (Not sure if I recommend bouldering as a start if you are not already somewhat fit)
I’m 39. I am overweight, but not in a way that has impacted my health. I started lifting weights a few months ago, after never having managed to stick to an exercise routine in my adult life. It’s quickly became surprisingly automatic to want to do it.
The things that have helped me have centered on altering my mental stance:
1) What do you do or want to do in life that would benefit from any sort of changes in your body? This could be anything from chronic pain, to being able to play with kids or pets, to mental energy level, to getting sick less often, to sexual performance, to a whole bunch of other things. If you can tie some form of exercise to a real goal, one that is actually intrinsically motivating for you, that can help. Ask what kind of physical capabilities would actually help with that thing, start small, and go from there.
2) Mary Poppins was right. In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun and snap! The job’s a game. In the past I always tried to focus on cardio and maintaining a calorie deficit to lose weight, and it never felt motivating. Strength training, for me, had much more of a numbers-go-up aspect that I was able to latch onto. It kind of intrinsically demands a steady but not overwhelming schedule in order to be effective. And it was also very nice to be able to see almost right away how much less my heart rate on my Fitbit went up during various kinds of activities.
I was the same and settled on walking as well. Can listen to podcasts or music, get a good pair of noise cancelling earbuds.
Also good to walk with friends and talk.
Find a route that takes an hour to get back to starting point and walk daily if you can.
I still hate exercise but I just keep doing them.
I made myself slowly accept doing runs and strength training over 5+ years. I still hate exercise with passion and fail to do them sometimes, but I do it for the long-term health benefits and the short-term mood benefits. I do notice being slightly happier for 1-2 days after exercising, and sleeping slightly better. I optimize for exercises being as short as possible without being absolutely dreadful (i.e. no HIIT or supersets unless I feel really really good that day).