How to enjoy exercise when you've always hated it

Research links feeling better during exercise with doing more of it later. In my work I see people start to like movement once it is chosen for how it feels on the day and is no longer tied to food. Nothing here is weighed or counted.

Say it's twenty to seven on a Wednesday evening. The kit has been in the bag by the door since Monday, and the class starts at half past. You are on the sofa with your coat still on, and the sentence arrives for the third time this week. "I'll go tomorrow." You know the class is paid for. You also know that the last time you went, you spent fifty minutes at the back watching the clock and left feeling worse than when you arrived.

The question underneath it is a fair one. Is exercise just not for some people? I don't think so.

> Key Takeaways > > - A systematic review of 24 studies linked feeling better during moderate exercise with being more active later. How people felt afterwards showed no such link. > - Mela Theory, the framework behind Nutrimelab, reads a lot of dislike for exercise as learned, often from years of movement being used as a punishment. > - The practice in this article is one kind of movement chosen only for how it feels, with nothing tracked or traded.

Why does exercise feel like a punishment?

Exercise often feels like a punishment, and Mela Theory, the framework behind Nutrimelab, reads that dislike as learned, not built in. In that reading, laps of the field for forgetting your PE kit and later years of exercise sold as a fix tend to leave a mark that outlasts school.

Mela places this in the identity layer, one of six learned layers (cues, habits, emotions, culture, identity and biology) that shape how each of us eats and lives. The identity layer covers how you see and treat your body. Mela reads movement as sitting on one side or the other of a line in that layer. On one side it is care, something you do for a body you live in. On the other side it is correction, something you do to a body you think is wrong.

When movement sits on the correction side, it tends to carry the mood of a correction. You go because you ought to, you check whether it has worked, and the session itself becomes something to get through. Mela sees that as the part worth changing, more than the activity.

This article sits inside a larger idea, which I've written about as looking after the body you have today. Movement is one of the ways you look after it, whatever you think of it.

When exercise gets tied to eating

Mela reads tying exercise to what you ate as the habit that most often turns movement into a chore. It places that idea in the culture layer, the slogans and the conversations about "being good" that many of us heard for years before we chose anything. Here, movement and eating stay separate.

How to enjoy exercise when you hate it

How a session feels while you are doing it is linked with whether you keep moving later. Rhodes and Kates' 2015 systematic review of 24 studies found that feeling better during moderate-intensity exercise was linked with more physical activity later. How people felt after the session showed no link with later activity.

That review pulled together studies with different designs and measures, so read it as a consistent pattern rather than a law (Rhodes and Kates, 2015). A second review is consistent with this from a different angle. Teixeira and colleagues looked at 66 studies on motivation and exercise and found consistent links between more exercise and doing it for reasons you value or enjoy. Enjoyment for its own sake was the stronger predictor of keeping going over the long term. The evidence on other motives, such as health or fitness and body-related ones, was mixed. Most of those studies were observational, not experiments (Teixeira et al., 2012).

In practice, this changes how you choose.

1. Choose by feel. Ask which of the things you could do this week you would mind least, or might even like, and pick that one, even if it looks too small to count.
2. Start below what you could manage, so the middle of the session stays comfortable.
3. Stop while it is still pleasant, before the point where you start watching the clock.

Mela reads ending on a good minute as something that often makes the next session easier to start.

Afterwards, ask yourself whether you would do that again, and let the answer guide what you pick next.

Say you have always hated running, and the only exercise you remember liking is the long walk with your sister on Boxing Day, talking the whole way. That walk is a clue. It tells you that you may like movement with company, outdoors, at a pace where you can talk, and with nobody timing you. A Saturday walk with a friend fits that description far better than a running app does.

How to enjoy exercise again, after a long gap

Often, going back to something you once liked can feel harder than starting something new. The old version of you is waiting there with the old numbers, the pace you used to run at or the class you used to keep up with. In Mela's reading those numbers are a comparison with yourself, and comparisons with yourself can take the pleasure out of a session as fast as comparisons with anyone else.

So leave the old numbers at home. If you used to swim, go to the pool and swim until you feel like getting out, without counting lengths. If you used to cycle, take the bike out for the part of the route you liked best and come back. If you used to dance, put on the songs you used to dance to and see whether your feet still want to move. How much you did doesn't matter this time. You are finding out whether the thing you once enjoyed is still there for you.

Expect the first session back to feel a bit awkward. You may not remember where the changing rooms are, or the bike may need its tyres pumped. That awkwardness often belongs to the first visit and fades by the second. If the first time back is the only time this month, that still tells you something useful about whether you want a second.

Rest counts too

Mela reads movement and rest as two halves of the same care, and rest is often the half that gets skipped. A walk you enjoyed and an evening on the sofa you allowed yourself both count as looking after your body. In Mela's reading, a body that is always being pushed tends to ask for comfort in other ways, often through food. If tiredness is part of your week, there is a separate piece on why rest belongs alongside movement and what tiredness tends to do to eating.

One thing to try this week

This week, pick one way to move that you choose only for how it feels. A walk to the shop at your own pace, or ten minutes of the thing you liked when you were twelve, whether that was skipping, kicking a ball against a wall or dancing in the kitchen with the radio on loud enough that nobody can hear you. Nothing is tracked or timed, and it has no link to what you ate today or plan to eat tomorrow.

When you finish, notice one thing. Did any minute of it feel good? Write that minute down somewhere, in a sentence. Say you chose a walk to the shop and the good minute was the bit along the canal where it went quiet. Next time, the walk can start at the canal, and the shop can wait. By the end of the week you will have a small note of what your body seems to like.

If no minute felt good, that is worth writing down as well. It may mean the activity or the time of day was wrong for you, not that movement is. Try something different next time, and keep the note anyway.

Your one action for today is to choose the movement and put it in the diary for a day this week.

Next step

See the 7-week programme