Are You Exercise Resistant?

I get a lot of phone calls for help with exercise, and what most people want is a way to be more motivated to stick with their routine. That seems simple enough, but there is a lot more to being motivated than creating motivational tactics and getting someone to hold you accountable. Maybe the problem isn’t really motivation at all. Maybe it is exercise resistance.

Motivation is having the internal drive to reach a specific goal or vision of what you want for yourself. What gets in the way of motivation is limited interest, being unprepared, letting other things be a greater priority, lack of support or accountability, not caring enough, not seeing results, and finding it hard to want to do it week after week. These are all pretty obvious and what nearly every one deals with when they start an exercise program.

What are not so obvious are the hidden emotions and beliefs also impacting your motivation and silently driving your day to day choices. Most likely you have plenty of past exercise-related experiences (from elementary school PE classes to junior high and high school team sports and then on to various gym and fitness programs) that influence what you believe and feel about exercise. Any negative experience, even if you have lots of good memories and did well at things for the most part, can affect how you look at things today.

All it takes is one event to change your mindset about exercise and find yourself resisting the whole idea of it. Has this happened to you? To test this, close your eyes and let the first thing come to mind when you think exercise. What word or image did you get? Was it positive or negative? Does it have anything to do with a past experience? Presuming you did get a negative connotation, such as I can’t do it, I’m too old, or I hate it. Consider where this comes from.

I was one of the fattest girls of my class in grade school and uncoordinated. I was a dolt on the field and in the gym, and my classmates made fun of me constantly. I felt as pathetic as I looked and dreaded going to gym class to prove them right again. In sixth grade the girls were told to create two teams for softball. The captains began picking from amongst the rest of us. It was getting down to me, and the kids made it clear they hoped they wouldn’t get stuck with me. It was humiliating to be the last pick and then go on to confirm the team’s worst fear. Exercise, as you can imagine, left a bad taste in my mouth. I hated the very idea of it and pretty much avoided it up until seven years ago in my early forties.

I’ve worked with many people who also had a rough time as a kid. One of my clients grew up feeling inadequate around organized sports, and what works for her now is hiking and kayaking. Another client had a similar past and he chooses to call what he does outdoors being active instead of exercise. I personally avoid classes and teams, choosing instead to exercise on my own. We’ve each found ways to be physically active by choosing things that don’t trigger old feelings but instead create new positive ones.

I’ve also had clients who had the opposite experience and later enjoyed going to the gym and being active, but then suffered an injury, had major surgery or became unfit. For them the struggle is more anxiety about what they can or can’t do and the fear of getting hurt. They’ve learned to start off slow and rebuild their confidence without setting too high an expectation.

Those who believed they couldn’t succeed or wouldn’t get results because they haven’t in the past, were able to change their thinking. They have discovered the past doesn’t predict the future and they can choose things they like, set realistic expectations, allow for weeks when they don’t meet all their goals, and moderate their pace to finally reach success.

The first step is to acknowledge and validate any feelings or beliefs you carry about exercise. Then knowing how these create resistance, you can make different choices or create new beliefs that respect your emotional needs and your physical health. In many ways exercise resistance is similar to emotional eating, in that unconscious feelings and thoughts are driving your behaviors and leaving you to feel out of control.

Alice Greene is president of Feel Your Personal Best, a healthy lifestyle coaching company located in Newburyport, MA. Contact her at agreene@feelyourpersonalbest.com or 978-465-3555×5.