How to be a regular Exerciser

Photo: Akuzawa Minoru demonstrates his body control and balance with the assistance of a heavier partner



Whether or not you are motivated by sport, the condition of your body makes a big difference on your daily experience, your health, and how well you perform in other areas of your life.

On top of the actual experience of enjoying a well conditioned body, there is also a host of statistical evidence that positively relates regular moderate exercise to health. It makes sense to exercise.

At the same time many people do not exercise regularly. I am not going to ask why not? That question has the wonderful effect of helping entrench people in their reasons 'why not.'

Rather I am going to to go over some of the mental strategies that regular exercisers use.

1. Enjoy exercise
Enjoyment and pleasure is a state, an attitude. There are certain kinds of exercise that are probably beyond my ability to do, so I will not do them. However there is plenty within my range that I can do safely, and at a level of effort that is not simply excruciating.

Then I can simply take satisfaction in the fact that I am doing the exercise.

I was talking to a fellow coach recently who has gone through a revolution in her attitude to exercise. She used to be overweight and started to see a personal trainer, and is now light and happier.

She stopped seeing the trainer regularly (a good trainer, like a good coach seeks to make themselves redundant after a short time) and someone asked her if she was still doing her exercises. She replied with a smile 'Yes I am, and I shall continue to do them for as long as I'm living' .

Then she explained ' I used to see slim people running, and I'd wonder if they are slim why do they have to run? Now I understand, it is because they run that they are slim.'

Incidentally this transformation took place when she was in her sixties.

Health and fitness are as much processes as goals. You do not stop doing them because you have 'arrived'. If they are a process that you continue through your life you may as well enjoy it.

2.Take pleasure in physical effort
This is an interesting illustration of how the way we interpret physical sensation determines our attitude to a situation.

When people who do not enjoy exercise train any effort is considered tortuous misery. Effort is proof of how unfit they are, and possibly a reminder of childhood humiliation. I was the last to be picked for the team as well, I know that feeling.
When people who like to exercise train the sensation of effort remains the same, however the interpretation changes. Exercisers link effort with their goals. Effort is proof that they are moving in the direction of how fit they would like to be, and thus becomes a source of satisfaction, even in the moment that it is happening.

An extreme example of this is the saying 'Pain is weakness leaving the body.' It is probably a little too extreme for me though.

3. Get curious about movement and the body
The body is wonderfully complex. There are so many possibilities of movement, and these link in to your mental state. You can never exhaust the possibility of learning from movement.

Moshe Feldenkrais distinguished between two kinds of exercisers. One kind equates exercise with raw effort. The harder you exercise, the better it is. The second type gets curious about how relaxed and efficient they can be when they move.

The first type tends to perform poorly, get injured, and create muscle imbalances across their bodies. When you see them run there is lots of movement, but not much speed. The result is that they try harder. As they age they accumulate bad habits.

The second has a sense that they can always improve their performance, that they can relax a little more, become slightly more efficient, slightly more graceful. So they constantly pay attention to how they are moving, how their body works. In this refinement they have many opportunities for enjoying the sheer flowing pleasure of movement.

For this reason I do not like health clubs with their habit of distracting people from what they are doing using music and video. It is the possibility of improving the quality of an exercise through attention that makes it interesting.

Take a Yoga or Taiji class where the exercise is slowed down enough to really put the mind into the body. That way you can make distinctions between different ways of doing the same external movement.

If you do not know what I'm talking about find someone with some skill and enthusiasm for movement and get invite them to share their fascination with you.

In making these kinds of changes you can explore all kinds of possibilities for physical pleasure. Yes, you can read that last statement in any way you like.

Being able to make distinctions in physical movement/sensation is also a great way of increasing emotional intelligence and sensitivity.

4. Use a mix of motivations
You can motivate yourself towards what we want or away from what we do not want.

As a competitive martial artist I used to live in a unspoken arms race with my my classmates. If we let the others get fitter or more skilled than us, then we would be literally beaten. It was a good motivation strategy - we worked hard to escape black eyes and humiliation. But it was also stressful, partly because there is always someone bigger, fitter and possibly more skilled who could well hit you.

A more reasonable away from is to move away from the bad feelings associated with being unhealthy and out of shape.

I have also motivated myself towards what I want, whether that is the image of me looking a particular way, or feeling a particular way, or receiving a particular compliment on how you look or perform.

Personally I believe that health and fitness are much more of a feeling than a look. So for me appearance is more a result of something deeper than an end in itself, however ripped and glossy the images in the fitness magazines are.

These days I picture myself blissfully freediving, having longer to enjoy the wonders of the ocean, and that makes me want to cycle faster climb more stairs and work harder on my circuits.

Another motivation is the way exercise and food relate. I like food, and food tastes better when you are really physically hungry. Therefore exercise is a way of enjoying food more. More accurately it is a way of enjoying more food more!

Comparisons with yourself and others can be motivating sometimes, but not always. I know people who I will probably never be as fit as, and also I probably won't be as fit as I was when I was a professional martial artist. If I compare myself to those times I risk being disheartened.

However if you compare yourself to some standard that you consider both possible, and worthwhile, then it can help get you going. The good thing about this is that as you reach one goal, then you may believe another is possible.

The expense of a health club membership does not work for many people as a motivation. think it is better to cut out the middle man and go straight to a personal trainer if you have the money to spend.

5. Integrate it into your life
Do you mind if I have another rant about health club culture...I used to cycle to a club I taught in that was couple of miles outside of a small town. I would be passed by a number of cars that I would find in parked a few minutes later. The people in the cars would be on stationary bikes, peddling away. It is the same with people who use stair machines and then take lifts. Not the most efficient use of time or energy.

Life presents all kinds of opportunities for mild to moderate exercise, whether stairs, carrying objects, using your body as a means of transport - cycling, walking, jogging. The latter can save you money, not to mention cut down on CO2 emissions while getting you fitter.

Considering it only takes 10 seconds to for an Olympic athlete to totally exhaust themselves in a sprint, exercise need not take a long time. Ten or fifteen minutes here and there can maintain a reasonable fitness level, boost metabolism and mental function. Even busy people can fit that in.

I have a friend who decides he will have a press up day. He sets a timer to go off every 40 minutes or so, and when it does he finds a place where he can (relatively) discretely pump out a set of press ups. He treats it like a game. You could even invite people to join in!

You can also integrate exercise with being sociable, dancing, playing football. When I lived in Taiwan people gathered in parks for all kinds of exercise, in the early morning and also in the evening. You could see ballroom dance, hip-hop, aerobics, and martial arts. You can also find people training in the wide corridors of shopping centres and underpasses.

They would also spend a chunk of that time chatting and getting to know each other. The younger ones would be displaying themselves to members of the opposite sex too. Exercise is very much built into that culture.

There are scores of opportunities for integrating exercise into your life, and if you have some influence you can make it easier for other people around you at the same time.


So whether you are have a long neglected sport, or never liked sports the key to regular exercise in attitude that it can be enjoyable, that effort is itself a pleasure, and that there are always a opportunities for both practise, and improvement.

I have deliberately not gone into the technicality of exercise, just the attitudes that sustain it. If you are already a regular exerciser and have some other attitude that you would like to add to this then I'll be happy to read it.

In the mean time train well and have fun!