Most of us would probably agree that exercise is beneficial for our health. Yet, despite all the known benefits, many of us don’t do any. Why is this? What deters us from taking up a new athletic hobby or incorporating a hike into our weekend plans?
I believe that many of us know exercise is good for our health because we’ve been told that, however, we might not understand why or how. My hope for Silver Bullet Health, therefore, is that it will inspire you to take up exercise if you haven’t already, by helping you understand the mechanisms behind how exercise benefits you. I’d like to think that if you fully comprehend the ways in which exercise improves your metabolic and heart health, for example, you might be less skeptical of it and also come to believe that exercise is a silver bullet.
However, that might still not be motivation enough. Knowing why something is beneficial to you doesn’t remove other barriers to entry. It might not change your beliefs that you don’t have enough time or perhaps that you’re ‘not the athletic type’, or maybe even that exercise is a painful ‘chore’.
The thing is, I felt that way for years too. I was always ‘too busy’ and never ‘sporty enough’. I imagined I had to be able to run a 10k to exercise properly, and that unless I was that fit, then exercise was futile.
Oh how wrong I was. You may also believe that, or you may be a little more discerning than I was and realise that’s not the case. Regardless, exercising regularly may seem like a step that’s too difficult to take, mostly because we imagine that it takes a massive daily commitment which we’re not yet ready to make.
When we think about beginning to exercise, we can quickly become discouraged by the thought of completely overhauling our lives. Many of us think of exercise as a time-consuming, painful and challenging addition to our day which we’d rather not do.
But here’s the thing… it doesn’t have to be.
How can we change our perception of exercise?
If we re-frame exercise in our minds we may begin to think of physical activity more positively and therefore want to take it up. In her opinion piece, Segar (2024) outlines that this re-framing of exercise and change in behaviour could happen through the following three mediators:
- Choosing to exercise in pleasurable ways
- Believing that all movement is valid and worth doing
- Perceiving exercise as self-care and prioritizing time for self-care and exercise
Making exercise enjoyable
For exercise to be valid and have a positive impact on your life, you don’t need to be doing the most painful and inconvenient activity to you!
Take me as an example: I hate running. For months I tried to get used to it and I would go out weekly to try and jog a 5k. But I still disliked it, so I stopped doing it because I dreaded it. I replaced my jogging with cycling on a watt bike and now I really enjoy my cardio. I love seeing whether I can beat the previous session’s average speed, and if I’ve had a particularly stressful day at work, you can bet I’ll be on the bike that evening burning off some steam!
The problem with jogging was that it wasn’t enjoyable to me, but I felt as though I needed to be capable of running to be sufficiently fit. With switching to cycling, I hit all three mediators: my cardio became more enjoyable, I realised that cycling was a good enough activity and I didn’t have to run, and I see my half hour on the bike as a de-stressor and means of self-care as it’s beneficial to both my physical and mental health.
Making exercise important… a priority
Another hurdle is often that we believe we lack time. I say believe because really, whether or not you have time, depends on whether the activity is important enough for you to make time (Craike et al., 2007; Henderson & Bialeschki, 1991).
I remember when I first understood this concept, it stung a little. The truth is, we make time for things that are important to us. So if we ‘don’t have time to exercise’, we need to evaluate whether or not we believe it’s a priority and whether we see it as important in our lives.
It requires us to be brutally honest with ourselves. If we discover exercise is not currently a priority and we want that to change so we can become fitter and healthier, then we have to make it one. The way we do that is by making decisions that change our behaviours and result in us exercising more frequently.
There are many steps we can take to motivate ourselves to exercise if we have a busy schedule, and I outline some of these in this article.
Every little counts
The great thing is that these first steps we take can be very small. Every little bout of exercise in a day adds up to your total physical activity, and any movement is better than none (Segar, 2024; Arena et al., 2018). So, if you can’t find a chunk of time in the day, do it in short, additive bursts of activity.
From the side of healthcare and those who understand exercise science, we can definitely do a better job of communicating this (Arena et al., 2018). When the general public thinks that the only type of exercise the NHS is promoting is Couch to 5k and similar programmes, it’s no wonder that so many people choose to remain sedentary!
Learning to run 5 km is beyond many of our capabilities, but what’s more, it’s not even necessary! Yes, the more exercise we do the better and benefits of exercise increase the more we do. But it’s important to note that even if we don’t reach the weekly exercise recommendations, our health still improves substantially (e.g. Leitzmann et al., 2007), because there is a greater positive effect when we go from being sedentary to doing a little exercise, than there is between doing a little physical activity and doing a lot!
What we often neglect to consider is that tasks like housework and gardening also count as physical activity, even though they are not considered to be a structured form of exercise. This is because the energy we expend through doing these activities is still higher than when we are sitting down or merely standing (Hermann et al., 2024; Compendium of Physical Activities, 2024). We should also add these tasks to our daily physical activity.
Exercise as self-care
Related to the ‘lack of time’ theme, we might consider exercise to be a luxury or an indulgence. This might be the case particularly if you’re raising a family, have many competing personal goals including having a lot of work to do in the home, (Gebhardt & Maes, 1998) and therefore think that taking time for yourself is selfish. But the thing is, exercise is necessary for your overall health. It’s essential for you to be at peak health so you can be there for your family when they need you most.
If you yourself are burnt out and in a bad way, it will be very difficult to support anybody else. So taking a little time for yourself every day is not selfish. It’s a smart decision that means you will be a stronger and more reliable person to lean on (pun intended) for those who are dependent on you. Really, it’s your duty to look after your own wellbeing, because nobody else can do it for you.
Interestingly, those who exercise because it improves how they feel right after they exercise, are the ones who tend to keep it up. On the other hand, those who would like to exercise to achieve a future goal, such as weight loss or avoiding chronic illness, are less likely to maintain a regular exercise routine (Mailey et al., 2018).
Setting exercise goals
This leads me onto the final point I’d like to discuss: goal-setting. It’s important when trying to exercise, that we set a series of small goals that are easily-achievable. It’s great to have one big, long-term goal, such as losing 20 lbs or running a marathon, but these goals cannot be our only motivation for exercise. They simply don’t work on a daily or session-by-session basis.
We need to re-frame our goals into immediately-achievable ones, such as feeling more energetic, or less stressed. During exercise endorphins are sometimes released, which is why people who run get a runner’s high afterwards. Exercise can make us feel better immediately, so it’s a good idea to focus on those immediate wins when trying to motivate ourselves to get moving every day (Mailey et al., 2018). Indeed, it is these goals that appear to predict exercise adherence (Stevens et al., 2020).
Conclusion
The thing about exercise is that it’s addictive. Once you discover that it makes you feel good, improves your mood, makes you feel stronger and allows you to feel healthier, you might automatically include more active time into your day, because you don’t want to suffer the consequences of neglecting your exercise.
For the time being just start slow. Take the stairs, walk to the shops instead of taking the car if you live close and consider going out for a walk when it’s sunny out. If you start by doing activities you enjoy, you’ll automatically want to do them more frequently (Segar, 2024; Stevens et al., 2020), and before you know it, you’ll be a regular exerciser too!
References
Arena, R., McNeil, A., Street, S., Bond, S., Laddu, D. R., Lavie, C. J., & Hills, A. P. (2018). Let Us Talk About Moving: Reframing the Exercise and Physical Activity Discussion. Current Problems in Cardiology, 43(4), 154–179. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpcardiol.2017.06.002
Compendium of physical activities. (2024). Compendium of Physical Activities. https://pacompendium.com/
Craike, M. J. (2007). The Influence of Leisure Preference, Life Priority and Making Time on Regular Participation in Leisure Time Physical Activity. Annals of Leisure Research, 10(2), 122–145. https://doi.org/10.1080/11745398.2007.9686758
Gebhardt, W. A., & Maes, S. (1998). Competing Personal Goals and Exercise Behaviour. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 86(3), 755–759. https://doi.org/10.2466/pms.1998.86.3.755
Henderson, K. A., & Bialeschki, M. D. (1991). Women and the meaning of physical recreation. In W. Liemohn (Ed.), American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance in the Research Consortium Meetings (p. 240).
Herrmann, S. D., Willis, E. A., Ainsworth, B. E., Barreira, T. V., Hastert, M., Kracht, C. L., Schuna, J. M., Cai, Z., Quan, M., Tudor-Locke, C., Whitt-Glover, M. C., & Jacobs, D. R. (2024). 2024 Adult Compendium of Physical Activities: A third update of the energy costs of human activities. Journal of Sport and Health Science, 13(1), 6–12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jshs.2023.10.010
Leitzmann, M. F., Park, Y., Blair, A., Ballard-Barbash, R., Mouw, T., Hollenbeck, A. R., & Schatzkin, A. (2007). Physical Activity Recommendations and Decreased Risk of Mortality. Archives of Internal Medicine, 167(22), 2453–2460. https://doi.org/10.1001/archinte.167.22.2453
Mailey, E. L., Dlugonski, D., Hsu, W.-W., & Segar, M. (2018). Goals Matter: Exercising for Well-Being But Not Health or Appearance Predicts Future Exercise Among Parents. Journal of Physical Activity and Health, 15(11), 857–865. https://doi.org/10.1123/jpah.2017-0469
Segar, M. L. (2024). The Motivation MAP: an exercise-message framework to foster positive affect, challenge all-or-nothing thinking, and prioritize self-care. Frontiers in Psychology, 15. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1441844
Stevens, C. J., Baldwin, A. S., Bryan, A. D., Conner, M., Rhodes, R. E., & Williams, D. M. (2020). Affective Determinants of Physical Activity: A Conceptual Framework and Narrative Review. Frontiers in Psychology, 11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.568331