January 1st is officially here, which marks the no-kidding-I-really-need-to-exercise milestone for many of us. But what do you do if you really hate exercising?
You have several options.
1) Just don’t do it and sometime around June when you’re about to go to the beach, you can feel guilty and terrible.
2) Hire someone like a personal trainer to force you to do it. It takes about 66 days on average for a new activity to become a habit so committing to two months with your own task-master may be a wise idea.
3) Combine exercise with being social i.e. joining a running group or meeting up with a friend for yoga every Saturday and going out to coffee afterward.
4) Combine exercise with another pleasure: watching your favorite TV show, listening to a great podcast, or subscribing to Audible. You’ll begin to make a positive association with getting to exercise.
5) Somehow make the long-term benefits feel more real and tangible by giving yourself rewards for milestones achieved, making a vision board or goal list for what you want to look and feel like by summer, keeping a video diary or your progress, or putting a list on your phone of all the benefits exercise gives you.
6) Emulate Nike and just do it. You don’t have to like it; you just have to show up.
That’s it in a nutshell: you don’t have to love exercising in order to do it. However, you have to find some way to make exercising compelling enough that you’ll do it again and again until it becomes a habit.
Do you hate exercising but do it anyway? Chime in and let us all know your secret!