If following an exercise routine were easy, we wouldn’t have a 21%+ obesity rate in America. Here’s 5 tips I use for making exercise a little more palatable.
- Find a podcast that matches your interest.
Music may help you keep a beat, but I find podcasts are much more fun – there’s something about listening to people talk about a topic I’m interested in that engages me in a way music doesn’t. Personally, I listen to several (most are related either to Disney or tech), including some of the TWiT.tv netcasts (I particularly like TWiT and Security Now), WDWToday and MouseTunes. - Drink water during your workout.
Because I exercise at 5:30am when I get up, I’m already at a water deficit as we use up calories and water even in our sleep. Instead of coffee, I drink a quart of water while I exercise – I feel more refreshed and comfortable during exercise, and more awake after. If I’m still dragging, my coffee maker automatically started brewing at 5:15am just in case. - Exercise with a buddy.
While I exercise alone at 5:30am, I do situps and pushups in the evenings with my wife. When our schedules allow for it, we visit the gym together. I have started playing raquetball again, and hope to soon settle on a consistent schedule. Volleyball starts in the spring, at which time I will likely join a team with a co-worker. Exercising with other people is not only fun, but it also makes you accountable – my wife doesn’t push me to do situps, but in my head that exercise time is an appointment or commitment, and I’m more likely to carry out a commitment than telling myself “I should probably exercise now.” - Make your decision to exercise once.
Before finishing Optifast, I couldn’t commit to an exercise routine. I was one of the teeming masses that applied myself in January, February, maybe March before other things took a higher priority. When I started making fitness-based lifestyle changes, I realized a small change in the way I approached exercising made a huge difference. Before, when I was unsuccessful at maintaining an exercise routine, I made a decision each day to exercise. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday – each day was a new decision, and a new opportunity to decide not to exercise. This time, I made one decision – to lead a more fit lifestyle, part of which requires daily exercise. Each day is simply a recurring appointment in my schedule.This may seem like a semantic difference, but making the decision once and approaching it like a scheduled appointment relieves the emotional angst I used to suffer. Where before I said daily “I need to exercise today” and accompanied that statement with the negative emotional subtext of “I need to change my life” and “I’m fat”, I now daily recognize my scheduled appointment to exercise, which carries no negative emotional attachment. Making one decision to dedicate my life to fitness then following a daily routine erases the emotional subtext and makes it much easier to follow through – I only get one opportunity to say no.
- Track your performance.
Some people say weigh daily, others weekly – I say weigh consistently. I also pay attention to my waist and other high-profile fatty areas (like my chin, armpits and thighs), my lipid panel, my food cravings – there are all sorts of performance indicators I have established for myself. Establishing these indicators isn’t enough though – I need to track them daily. At the least, I find it important to track my daily caloric intake, exercise, weight, water consumption, amount of sleep and emotional state. Not only does recording this data daily keep my dedication to fitness in the forefront of my mind, it also gives me an opportunity to set an “alert weight” that indicates I’m starting to slide Also, by watching trends, particularly in my food consumption and sleep, I can track possible causes for days when I am in a funk.
I have been evaluating some online fitness journals to see if there are any worth using; stay tuned for a full report soon. If you have any favorites online journals, or other exercise tips you use, I would love to hear them – let me know in the comments.
