Exercise is crucial to living a healthy life. If you’re more of a sedentary person, opening yourself up to regular movement that gets your heart rate pumping and keeps your muscles flexible will improve your life tenfold. However, there are various reasons why someone may not want – or be able to find the motivation – to do this.
One of the main reasons for this is very simple: exercise doesn’t seem very enjoyable. If someone tries exercising on a regular basis, and only feels pained, exhausted, and bored, they’re not going to continue with their regime for much longer. It’s just too much time and effort for what seems like very little payoff!
But that’s something we can help with. Exercise can be turned into something fun and enjoyable with just a few tweaks to the activities, routines, and circuits you can do. Getting your brain involved just as much as your body will make all the difference to your life, and trust us when we say it’ll be a beneficial one.
So without further ado, here are some effective ways to turn exercise into an enjoyable thing you don’t mind making space in your life for. Not only will this be good for you, but it can set a good example for those around you as well.
What’s Preventing Exercise From Feeling Fun?
Before we get started with the rest of the tips on this list, we should address a potential elephant in the room. If you’re someone who has encountered the problems we talked about above, you’ve probably already tried to make exercise more enjoyable for you. You’ve probably also run into a brick wall one too many times to keep trying to turn exercise into something fun!
So let’s stop for a minute and think about what’s going wrong here. What is it that’s preventing exercise from feeling fun for you? If you can work that out, you’ll have fought at least 75% of the battle and leave with the upper hand.
However, coming to the right conclusion can be harder than you think. After all, there could be a few different things that ruin the vibe of exercise for you.
Indeed, the reasons could be as complex as being unhappy with the level of activity you’re currently capable of doing, and that’s a very hard thing to come to terms with and unpack. Within this, you could also have long standing medical issues that make exercising regularly much harder for you. Again, this is something that’ll take a lot of time and effort to get to grips with, and that can wear out all the energy you had for exercising before you’ve really tried it.
In scenarios like this, it’s good to talk to your doctor about your plans and worries and get their advice. You can also turn to other specialists like nutritionists and PTs to find out what they recommend.
Refine Your Workout Playlist
What do you listen to when you’re working out? If it’s something you’re not really feeling, and you’re only listening to things other people recommend or say you should be using to stay focused, you’re going to be putting yourself on the back foot.
Always have something you find fun playing in your ears or over your speakers. The more you can workout along to some good tunes that make you feel pumped and ready to go, the more you’re going to enjoy the physical activity you undertake.
You could also make use of more novelty apps that help you to keep to your fitness goals. Some people like to go running with the use of an app that simulates a zombie apocalypse, with environmental sounds of zombies playing through your headphones while the app itself marks how fast you’re going.
Slowing down means these sounds get nearer and louder, which can make it much easier to speed up again and beat your personal best! If that sounds like fun to you, be sure to give it a go the next time you’re pounding the pavement.
Start Exercising with Someone Else
If you find that exercising on your own is a total bore, get someone else to exercise with you. Exercising can be a great social activity to share with someone, and you can spend quality time with friends and relatives by going for a walk or run together, or hitting the gym for an hour before going to lunch with each other.
When someone you enjoy spending time with is with you, you’re always going to have a much better time working out!
Got a Home Gym? Make Space for Other Activities
If you’ve already got a home gym in your house, take a step inside it right now and think about the layout. What do you see? Maybe it’s been set up for activities like weightlifting and there’s a treadmill or stationary bike to make use of, but otherwise it’s a pretty plain room that doesn’t inspire much passion within you.
If that’s the case, it’s time to give your home gym a rethink and set up an exercise space that actually goes the extra mile for you. The next time you walk into your gym space, we want you to feel like you can actually enjoy your time in there, rather than just go through the motions.
Now this will involve a bit of deep thinking, to discover what it is you’d like to do with your exercising time, but that doesn’t have to be a problem. To start with, think about your passions around sport and exercise that aren’t necessarily things you take part in yourself.
You could be a soccer fan, for example, and that could mean setting up an indoor mini pitch of your own. Or if you like boxing as a sport, and you’re a big fan of watching matches, you might get a kick out of setting up a home gym designed for boxing, where you can start practicing the techniques yourself.
And if you don’t already have a gym space within your home, maybe it’s time to get yourself one? This is a good way to incorporate exercise into your life without even thinking about it – and who doesn’t love not needing to leave the house to be healthy? If you’ve got a spare room, or even an empty garage that’s doing nothing else, think about turning it into a gym space you can enjoy using two to three times a week.
Try a Few Games
Playing games is a form of exercise, and it’s always going to be a fun one. When you can disguise exercise and dress it up as something more involved, active, and enjoyable, you’re going to be staying healthy without even realizing it.
It’s the same reason why kids are more likely to get their 10000 steps in per day than adults are. They’re on the move all the time, using their energy in the activities and games they enjoy playing. So, why not follow this same principle?
Recognize Your Progress
No one will enjoy themself if they can never stop to look at how far they’ve come. It’s not good to always be looking at the future; if you don’t let yourself look behind you to see the journey you’ve made, you’re not going to understand just how much work you’ve put in.
And that’s a thing worth celebrating! Letting yourself recognize this progress will make exercise feel so much more enjoyable. You’re giving yourself the chance to see what gains you’ve made and what you’ve achieved, and it’s OK to pat yourself on the back and say well done.
Make a plan to do this on a regular basis, maybe every 6 months or so. Compare your ‘current stats’ to what you were achieving in the past and make sure you congratulate yourself for sticking to your routine and making the progress you’ve always wanted to see.
And if you find that you’ve not made any notable gains, this will also be a necessary review. After all, if it turns out you’re plateauing and need to make some changes to your regime, it’s better to know that now than somewhere further down the line.
Make Exercise Something to Look Forward To
If you’re in the camp of people who dislike exercise on a personal basis, the tips above could help you to adjust your mindset. Exercise is good for you, and while it’s up to you to decide when and where you get your workouts in, they should always be something you feel good for doing.
And sometimes that means indulging your inner child a little and trying to do something fun! It’s OK to find exercise boring; many people would agree with you. But from here, you can work out what it is that causes exercise to be more of a bane than a benefit, then start making changes that are going to help you live more healthily and happily.
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