How To Love Exercise Again
One of the greatest DMs I ever got happened about 6 years ago when I was working in London as a Personal Trainer.
This wonderful human messaged me asking for details about my Personal Training…and I asked her why she wanted to work with me?
Her response was:
“All of your clients look like they are having fun”
Amy became a client for two years. Her partner and now fiancee…soon to be husband, and I can’t wait to see them get married...became a client for 3 years.
I miss Amy and Howard every day and when I got that message, it lit me up.
It got me in the feels.
Many many many of the friends I work with usually come to me because they believe that I have the key to helping them love exercise again.
They see my balanced approach, my forgiving tone, and my ability to program to their needs, and I think I make them feel safe and special.
As a Personal Trainer, my job is to make you feel two inches taller when you walk out of the gym than when you walked into it - sadly, just tracking your weight loss doesn't do that.
But rebuilding your relationship with exercise so that you can learn to love moving again is one of the most important things I can do for anyone who comes across me - and I want to help you improve your relationship with exercise.
And as you are here…I want to show you exactly how to do that here in this article. Show you precisley how to love exercise again.
But first, let's be friends. The fact you are here means so much to me. And if we become friends I’ll email you things. Sometimes they will be educational, sometimes they will be inappropriate, and sometimes I might just want to know how you are; either way…it would be delightful to connect with you.
Just send me a friend request by filling out the form below…
Oh, and I will also send you some free fitness goodies to help start our new friendship off on the best foot possible.
TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR “HOW TO LOVE EXERCISE AGAIN”
Terminology Matters
Why are you exercising?
Releasing expectation: The All or Nothing Mindset
Ask Yourself How and What?
The Success Loop
Terminology Matters
I have to start here.
Not because I don’t think you need to learn how to talk.
But you probably do need to learn how to talk about exercise…
The words we chose, and the verbiage we work with each and every day is very very important. View the way you talk about movement in your life as micro messages for your relationship with it.
Words carry great meaning in our lives and if you are trying to rebuild a relationship - or even begin a relationship with movement then the words you use will frame the way in which you think about what it is you are doing.
And there are some key things you need to change here.
The fitness industry thrives from talking about extremes because extremes sell. They create a void between you and the outcome and therefore you will spend money on making that void smaller.
What the fitness industry sucks at in terms of its verbiage is balance - and the more you use words and terms that promote balance in your thoughts, the better your relationship with movement will become.
Say: “Movement” not Exercise
A paper called “Move Your DNA: The Difference Between Exercise and Movement” [1] which was published by the Journal of Evolution and Health in 2017 it outlines a very interesting concept between the two words of Movement and Exercise.
It states that: “Caspersen et al. (1985) define “physical activity” as “any bodily movement produced by skeletal muscles that result in energy expenditure” (i.e., calories utilized) and “exercise” as “physical activity that is planned, structured, repetitive, and purposive in the sense that improvement or maintenance of one or more components of physical fitness is an objective.”
The paper then goes on to define the movement as:
“Movement” is a term used abundantly in discussions about evolutionary health, yet has not been clearly defined—especially as compared to related terms like “exercise” and “physical activity.” However, the effects and benefits of movement are not limited to caloric expenditure and physical fitness; movement facilitates operations in almost every human system (e.g. immune, digestive, nervous)”
And it concludes with the proposed definition of movement as: “any motion that creates a change in the shape of a body or parts of a body”
Which is a phrase I like. A lot.
Previously I stated that words carry great meaning - and the word Exercise is wrapped up in feelings of struggle, punishment, diet culture, expelling calories, and Physical Education classes you muddled through and hated doing…
Whereas Movement.
Well, we all move. All of the time.
We all have to move all of the time, and therefore all movement matters.
When you look at your Workout Plans and understand that they are a very small concept of your overall movement for the day you fall into line with the Science.
And when you are trying to lose weight, being aligned with the science as opposed to being at odds with it will help give you perspective and allow you to rebuild that relationship with exercise.
When you workout you are merely burning 5% of the Calories you will burn overall for that day.
It’s a small piece of the pie.
But when you look at Movement in total it’s 90% of the calories you burn every day divided thus:
70% is your Basal Metabolic Rate - your metabolic baseline
15% is your daily movement outside of prescribed exercise - we call this NEAT (Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis).
5% is your prescribed movement session or a “workout” (Activity Thermogenesis)
And when you can see your movement in this way, you see that all movement matters, all movement is important…and missing a workout really isn’t that big a deal.
In fact missing a workout should be seen as an opportunity missed to get stronger, not a moment where you failed and gained weight. When you see it as a missed opportunity to get stronger, you can easily recuperate that moment by doing one thing…giving yourself the opportunity again.
To learn more about your Metabolism please read my article that has helped hundreds of people understand the science of burning calories and help them improve their relationship with exercise
Food is nourishing, not good or bad
We have grown up in a society where we divide foods into two groups.
Food that is good for you, and food that is bad for you.
However, neither is true.
Foods can be more nutrient-dense and less nutrient-dense. Foods can have higher calories or lower calories. Foods can make us feel more energised or less energised.
And that is it.
Of all my clients on the Strong and Confident Program I ask one thing of them when it comes to diet, and that is to use their guiding light as the word “nourishing”.
Because there are times in your life when a Pizza (especially when there is Pineapple on there) is going to nourish you, and there are times when a Pumpkin Salad will nourish you also.
Sometimes you need to nourish your cells with nutrient-dense foods. Sometimes you need to nourish your emotions with food that is like getting a warm hug.
Both are valid and neither take you away from your goals, so long as you are giving yourself absolute permission to enjoy the food you are eating and therefore can enjoy it without guilt attached.
A key metric in being able to do this is understanding how much weight the human actually gains from overeating.
A study [2] produced by the American Diabetes Association looked at just this. It took 29 men and made them eat at 40% above their Maintenance Calories for 8 weeks every single day. This varied between 1200kcal and 1500kcal ABOVE their maintenance calories. Every. Single. Day.
In two months of overeating in a controlled environment, they gained just 9lbs of body fat, or 0.16lbs of fat a day.
By having some food when you need to nourish your emotions, it isn’t going to make you gain a stone overnight. It’s not going to derail all of your progress. This doesn't mean don’t take actions that help you process your emotions and your stress levels, of course, I would always recommend that, but one very key aspect of managing those stress levels when you are working towards a goal in movement is to comprehend what really happens to your body when you indulge, as opposed to what you think is gong to happen.
Say: Stronger, not Slimmer
This will be the title of my next book.
And yes, if you’re a publisher reading this please drop me an email, because I REALLY WANT TO WRITE THAT BOOK (adam@thegymstarter.com)
You have been told your whole life that slimmer is better. Thinner is sexier. But it’s not true.
The truth here is that getting stronger is more accessible to everyone.
There is this phenomenon in life called “Set Point Theory”. The fact it is referred to as a theory has always cast doubt in my mind about its validity, however, the more I have looked into it, the more I understand where the “theory” comes from and the truth behind it.
In this study called: Is there evidence for a set point that regulates human body weight?
”Taken collectively, these data provide evidence for the idea that there is biological (active) control of body weight and also weight stability (and thus a set point at a healthy steady-state) in response to eating healthy chow diets. By contrast, this regulation is lost or camouflaged by Western diets, suggesting that the failure of biological control is due mainly to external factors”
The study proposes that there isn't so much a “set point” but a range described as a “settling point”: upon which adult bodies exist at.
Colloquially I have known this to be true as well. When I became a Personal Trainer I dreamed of the transformation pictures I was going to create for my clients where they looked like totally different humans, but what I have found to be true is that in those photos you see on Instagram, they nearly always are different humans, or at least the photos are incredibly heavily edited.
I learnt this lesson about two years in when it just dawned on me that for the majority of my clients, who could afford Personal Training, they had a very set environment - a stable job, a stable relationship, a stable home life, very regular habits, and they were for the most part very comfortable in their environment - which meant when it came to losing weight with them, we were discussing losing a few pounds, not a few stones.
And surprisingly the clients who were the most consistent, the most engaged and the most interested in their fitness journey’s were those who focussed on getting Stronger - not slimmer.
The study cited above concludes that your body does have biological settling points, but it is actually your environment that is masking over what these true setpoints are - and changing your environment is really hard to do - because as we grow older we build our responsibilities on our stability.
I would also argue that the word environment refers to both internal and external environments. The study cited above only look sta the physical environment. But your mental environment here is just as powerful and must be dealt with as much due care and attention. The way in which you view yourself, speak about yourself to yourself and others is as much a part of your environment as the physical world you live in.
This is why getting stronger is a much more accessible way to focus your movement compared to losing weight.
Stronger, not slimmer.
It’s also why I created the Strong & Confident Program, not the Slimmer Is Better Program.
Say: Energy, not Calories
Calories are a unit of measurement of energy in your food. However, Calories are often associated with over restriction and/or overeating.
They can be used as a method to count your food amounts and therefore control what it is you are eating. This isn’t true in all cases with all people, I personally am a proponent of being Calorie aware, but if you are someone who is trying to learn how to love exercise again, or even trying to learn how to love exercise period, then focussing on calories might not be useful for you.
Instead, look at your food with a wider angle lens.
Look at it as Energy - and when you are managing your nutrition throughout the day ask yourself what kind of Energy do I want from what it is I am eating.
Sometimes that energy will be of comfort. Sometimes that energy will be of absolute nourishment. Sometimes it will be that of community.
When you view your food as an energy source, as opposed to a calorie source, you will choose foods that relate far deeper to your needs of hunger and nourishment compared to if you just focussed on the calories and the macros involved with the food you are eating.
Say: Exploration, not Right/Wrong
I repeat this message daily to my clients on the Strong & Confident Program.
I have to repeat it daily because in some cases for 50+ years they have been told that what they are doing is wrong - and what they should be doing is right.
Undoing 30+ years of micro-messaging from diet companies, fitness magazines, lifestyle magazines and modern media is hard work.
But its work that I personally see as an honour to have to do.
If you are familiar with my work, and that of Kamala, you will know the phrase you are about to read. If you are new to my work, then this is the single most important thing I need you to understand when it comes to movement and nutrition.
Are you ready?
You can’t get a movement plan wrong. You can’t get your nutrition wrong. You can’t get anything on a fitness journey wrong.
A fitness journey means that it exists without judgement.
If you constantly think that what you are doing is right or wrong, then you are constantly living in a world with judgement. You aren’t on trial, you aren’t in front of a jury - and if you think you are…then you need to recover that relationship yourself.
Living through judgement is very stressful, both internal judgement and external judgement - and this work can be hard enough as it is, without that added stress being added.
Why are you exercising?
And if it is to “put the ab in fab” then you need to stop. RIGHT NOW.
I touched on this above but I wanted to go a little bit deeper into this particular theme.
I have trained many many people who wanted to lose weight - and the reasons for this are multi-faceted. It could be because they want to look good at a wedding, it could be because they feel uncomfortable in their skin, it could be because they think losing weight will improve their self-confidence.
I want you to take a moment and think about when you have engaged with movement before. What was the reason you did it for?
“Did you want to lose weight because of ‘X’?”
And if so…ask yourself why can X only happen in the context of weight loss.
Why do you need to lose weight in order to:
Look good at a wedding? Feel comfortable in your skin? or have self-confidence?
The truth is that you simply do not need to lose weight in order to achieve any of those things. You need to be able to give yourself permission outside of losing weight in order to explore those feelings.
There are two great ironies in terms of weight loss and exercise.
The first is as I outlined above in the sense that it is counterintuitive to your metabolism to engage with prescribed exercise for the sole reason to create weight loss.
The second is that dieting undermines your confidence. You are literally pulling the rug from under your feet every time you diet. You are making yourself constantly question your validity, question your choices and question your freedom around movement and exercise in the name of reducing your body size.
As opposed to giving yourself permission to enjoy what it is you are doing, what it is you are trying to achieve.
This is why changing the framing of why you are wanting to move is really important.
Changing it from “to lose weight because of X”
To:
“Get strong enough to fight a bear in the woods”
This will take away food guilt and frustration because suddenly foods that were off your imaginary fat loss table are now in play - because to get strong enough to fight a bear, my friend, you’re going to need the calories and you will feel the need to choose foods that nourish your goals, rather than withdraw you from them.
100% of my clients who only moved to reduce their body size have all struggled to be consistent with their movement schedules.
100% of my clients who move to get strong enough to fight a bear in the woods have a relationship with exercise that is based on discovery and investigation.
A relationship with exercise that excites them with the possibility and releases them from the guilt of diet culture.
Losing weight may well be a consequence of their actions, but when they have a framing of getting stronger they see their movement plans as opportunities of growth, opportunities of development and opportunities of discovery.
And if you miss an opportunity that’s ok.
But when you believe that your movement schedule is the key to losing weight, and you attach the all or nothing mindset to it, then you will attach far too much guilt to missing a movement session which will eventually lead to you giving up and feeling like a failure compared to having a more balanced perspective.
Move to get strong in your body, in your mind and in your soul.
That is a much more inspiring message to tell yourself than because you want to fit in a dress because society deems that more acceptable.
Releasing expectation: The all-or-nothing mindset
When you approach movement and nutrition with an all or nothing mindset you always end up with nothing.
Extremes lead to extremes.
You may well be able to give your movement a 100% attitude for a period of time, but when you have done that, and you can’t keep up with it, like the vast majority of people who are not professional athletes can’t, then when you grind to a halt because of stressors in your life like work, family and other things, you again end up feeling like a failure and giving up.
Some people can give movement their all for 6 months.
Some people can give movement their all for 6 weeks.
Some can do it for a week.
But they all end up stopping when they believe that the only way to success is by giving it all.
Those who incorporate a balanced approach to their movement success end up being more consistent over much longer periods of time and being able to adopt a balanced mindset is much easier said than done.
How to adopt a balanced mindset to movement and nutrition?
My best piece of advice for this is to adopt what I call a wide-angle lens.
Zoom out on your life.
Stop listening to diet culture that makes you think that you should be able to lose 10kgs in 12 weeks. Stop allowing yourself to feel like a failure when you have a Pizza with pineapple on it because you believe it has made you gain 3lbs of fat.
Stop calling yourself fat.
You have fat.
There is a difference between those two statements.
You must comprehend and understand and truly internalise what I outlined previously about the body’s settling points. Great change of your body requires a change in both your internal and external environments, and that is not something that is accessible to all people.
But getting stronger is.
You must realise that one movement session will not give you muscles like Arnie. That one can of Spinach will not make you look like Popeye.
And that missing one movement session will not undo all of your progress.
Or that eating one bag of chips will not make you gain 6lbs of body fat.
Nothing in life changes that quickly - and that is a good thing.
I would even argue you could miss a month from moving and the progress you “lose” is finite.
By comprehending this, you will find freedom in both your movement and your nutrition. You will be able to give yourself full freedom and permission to enjoy foods you want to eat, and you will be able to remove the guilt and stigma from your life that is associated with your actions.
You will be able to find peace from second-guessing everything that you do - because you can begin to realise that it just isn’t that big a deal.
I’m a personal trainer, I have a roster of clients that rely on me every day for my expertise in this field, and there are times that I don’t work out, there are times that I eat pizza three days in a row, and there are times I may have alcohol every night - erm 2021 and lockdown is calling.
The only reason I am able to do this is that when I look at myself over the years I know that I have been consistent with my movement and nutrition more than not.
And consistent means at a maximum 25 days out of 30 in a month.
Not 30 days out of 30 - that’s perfection.
You will always need to have respect for your work, your home life, other demands on your being like socialising and travelling - and by making sure you have a wide-angle lens on what it is you want to achieve you will always be able to make movement and nutrition fit in around these things. But when you have the all or nothing mindset…when bigger priorities like paying your mortgage kick in, you will feel like you are letting yourself down, when in fact you are just being a beautiful human being.
There will always be pressure from all angles of your life - and therefore the more we can work on releasing pressure from your movement, you will be able to build a much better relationship with it. Take Kevin for example, if we can take exercise out of his hot pot, he might not be so overwhelmed and might not drop everything on the floor….and that’s the goal.
To view the movement as something that stops your cup from overflowing - not adds to your overwhelm.
I found this when looking for GIFs about Balance.
And it brightened up my day - I hope it does yours too.
Ask Yourself How and What Questions
You have more than likely seen many a Personal Trainer talks about your “Why?”. Some dude in a room in a gym that knows nothing about you pretending to give a shit about why you want to “get fit” and that his methods of Heavy Barbell Back Squatting will magically answer all the problems associated with your marriage, relationship with children and take out the stress from work.
This dude who is 25 years old, lives with his parents and has no idea how hard you find moving and how nervous you were to ever step foot in the Gym because well let’s face it, he has the empathy of a Goldfish.
Finding out about clients’ “Why” is nothing other than a sales tactic, and unsurprisingly it sets you up for failure. It focuses you on all of your insecurities, and it focuses your mind on fixing those insecurities.
It turns your main focus into a results-based solution.
A “why?” question is what’s known as an extrinsic motivational question.
And the issue with extrinsic motivation is that it fades quite quickly. Especially when the lived experience is not what your expectation was at the start. When those results aren’t as forthcoming as quickly as you think they should be, or when your life takes over and you can’t show up as much as you hoped, you think everything is going wrong and that you will never be able to achieve what you hoped for.
You need to get down and dirty with intrinsic motivational questions.
This is why as your Coach I would ask you different questions. I would only ask you:
How are you going to achieve your objectives?
What are you going to do to achieve your objectives?
And your mind will be razor-focussed only on the next week or two.
This way you throw yourself into a process.
Carol Dweck in her book “Mindset” states:
If you really want to learn how to love exercise again the greatest thing you can do is forget about the why - and enjoy the process.
Become who you want to become. Rather than try to live up to being who you want to be.
You have probably heard Personal Trainers all over the internet tell you to enjoy the process without you actually being told how that happens. I know I have experienced this.
I have been told it so many times, I almost feel guilty that I don’t enjoy the process because no one showed me how that part works - they just told me to enjoy it.
No one actually laid it out for you in a way you can actually comprehend. But I am going to do that for you…
To truly enjoy the process you must see your movement as an investigation.
And each time you do a movement session, you will give yourself one goal, one new thing to investigate. Lifting weights and building strength is a skill. Developing movements is a skill, and skill is developed in one way.
Through mindful repetition.
There is a very famous quote that states:
I would also like to add the word persistence to that quote.
Especially in relation to building strength.
It’s not just enough to repeat something, without being present with it, and in order to bring your mind with you to your workout, you need to investigate what it is you want to achieve.
When I was on Stage, one of the very best Directors I ever worked with every night at the half-hour call would come on the tannoy and announce:
“Your theme for tonight’s performance is X”
And he would insert a theme that he knew was a feature of the story, and he would want us to see how that thought would enhance our ability to tell the story for that evening’s audience.
The themes he came up with would be both technical and emotional:
Love
Money
Sex
Hatred
Poetry
Positioning
Listening
Friendships
Loss
Danger
Super Objectives
And the list goes on. Each night, we would allow this one word to resonate through our performance and see how that might change the rhythm and the presence of our performance.
Performing a Play for a total of one hundred performances is going to get monotonous and stale. There is a trap that many ensembles fall into where they just phone in the performance because they know it that well, and they can run it on auto-pilot.
Ever felt like that in the Gym? Of course, you have.
But your movement session should not be phoned in. You should try your hardest to not make it seem like you’re just there doing the work for the sake of the work - this can’t be avoided every time of course - but investigating a theme when you workout it can reduce the chances of this happening to you.
Investigation cues I use with clients are:
Develop the range of motion
Explore the floor
Root the Glutes
Stack your joints
Tempo
The feeling of strength
What muscle are you trying to activate?
Intensity of Exertion
How does one movement pattern inform another movement pattern?
Some of these are more complex than others, and some of them require more context than I can get into here on the Blog - they are always ongoing and deep discussions with my clients on how they can get the most out of their movement and develop the skill.
The Success Loop
In my article, “How Do You Get Motivated To Lose Weight and Exercise?” I outline the idea of the success loop.
The success loop is something I have designed to help people understand the science behind motivation and how they can make sure that motivation is the last thing they rely on in order to love exercise again.
Many people think that beginning fitness starts with Motivation.
They see their journey thus:
Get Motivated -> Take Action -> Get Results
However, Motivation actually works this way:
You take action first, then you get results and those results are what keep you motivated.
Or as I say it:
DO -> TRACK -> REPEAT
The Success Loop takes this one step further, and looks like this:
Here you can see I have added in a very important aspect of what continues to perpetuate your motivation to investigate movement - and it is education.
Because educating yourself can keep you inspired to carry on.
As you look to rebuild your relationship with exercise, I want you to think about how much are you learning on this journey. Heck, you wouldn’t have a hobby and not learn how to do it. Many many people think exercise is something you justhave to show up for, tick the box and away you go…
But when you start investigating what and how you are going execute your movement, you start to look at educating yourself in the process - and the more you learn, the more awesome your movement will become.
So read Blogs, follow people who focus on educating you, not showing off in front of you, question the choices your personal trainer makes with them and ask them insightful questions about how you move and why things are they way they are in your sessions.
Education leads to empowerment.
And an empowered human is a Strong and Confident human.
And Finally…
Before you consider everything in this Blog Post the heartbeat of how you move, what you move in what way and how to truly love exercise again is that you have to enjoy it.
At the very front of the success loop, at the very front of what you chose to do, before you even think about about what to do and how to do it you must ask yourself - what do I enjoy doing the most?
This whole article has been about how to change your outlook on movement.
To promote a more balanced view of fitness in your mind, because being imbalanced is probably the reason you feel out of love with movement in the first place.
Every human I have ever worked with, who had the sole desire to move in order to lose weight, has had an awful relationship with exercise, and we have had to do some really hard work to refocus them onto the thought of getting stronger and more confident.
Because there is nothing inspiring about reducing the size of your body.
You should love yourself more than having a mentality of diminishing yourself.
You should love yourself so much that you do things you enjoy - and learn how to enjoy them more.
Have fun. You deserve to have fun, just like Amy wanted to all those years ago.
And, in my most personal of opinons, that is a far more insipiring thought than going to the Gym to just burn some calories.
Did You Find This Useful?
Firstly I want to say a huge thank you for reading my article, and I hope it has given you some food for thought in relation to rebuilding your relationship with movement.
Across this website, I have other Articles all about managing your relationship with exercise:
I would also love to invite you to grab some free fitness goodies from me, including a free month of coaching on The Strong and Confident Program
You also have a unique opportunity to grab a Free Month of Coaching from me as a thank you for being here.
Thank you so much for reading my article - I really hope you found it helpful.
References:
Anon, Move your DNA: Movement ecology and the ... - escholarship.org. Available at: https://escholarship.org/content/qt1k6948g0/qt1k6948g0.pdf?t=q3qtt8 [Accessed November 14, 2021].
Johannsen DL, Tchoukalova Y, Tam CS, et al. Effect of 8 weeks of overfeeding on ectopic fat deposition and insulin sensitivity: testing the "adipose tissue expandability" hypothesis. Diabetes Care. 2014;37(10):2789-2797. doi:10.2337/dc14-0761
Müller MJ, Bosy-Westphal A, Heymsfield SB. Is there evidence for a set point that regulates human body weight?. F1000 Med Rep. 2010;2:59. Published 2010 Aug 9. doi:10.3410/M2-59