How to Incorporate Exercise into Your Life, Forever!

Exercise is one of the greatest tools we can use to improve our physical and mental health. Although exercise is important, it is nonetheless an extremely challenging activity for many people to incorporate into their lives. Below are three tips to help incorporate exercise into your life, forever! Tip #1: Fun Comes First It is paramount that whichever physical activity you choose to do must be enjoyable. Who wants to embark on a lifetime of participation in physical activity that is not enjoyable? Surely not me! Finding fun in exercise is the first tip because it is absolutely the most important. The best exercise you can do is the exercise you will actually keep doing! If you don’t like lifting weights, don’t lift weights. If you don’t like running, don’t run. There are so many (and I mean MANY) forms of physical movement that bring about the benefits of exercise. Life is too short to force yourself to do exercises you really don’t like. If you are unsure which physical activities you might enjoy most, then consider making a plan to try a variety of different physical activities over the course of two to three months. After each activity, write down what you liked and did not like about each activity. Over these months, you can sift through your notes about each physical activity to recognize patterns in what you enjoy most in a physical activity. These patterns will help you ascertain physical activities that you’ll enjoy doing longterm! For more information about learning to find enjoyment in physical activity, check out another blog post I made specifically about this topic! Tip #2: Appreciating ALL the benefits of exercise  The benefits of exercising are many, and some are easier to recognize than others. You can measure progress in exercise via a physical performance metric, like completing a race in a faster time, or moving a heavier weight, but you can also measure progress via how you feel. For example, you could pay attention to how you sleep better, how you feel less stressed, or how you experience happiness more often. The forms of progress most satisfying are highly subjective. Many people are taught how to measure progress in exercise only via a performance improvement or a change in their physical appearance. I strongly encourage you to spend time thinking about other, intangible values that exercise may bring into your life because eventually, as we age, our performance will decline regardless of our effort. The truth is no matter how hard a person works, they will not be able to continually progress in performance metrics their entire life. Finding value in the intangible benefits of exercise will help keep us encouraged and motived to continue exercising as we enter our older years. Tip #3: Finding Community Participation in physical activity that involves others is an excellent way to have fun, shared experiences. It is through these shared experiences that we develop relationships and build community. When you can count on your friends showing up to exercise with you, your motivation to exercise becomes so much greater!   

If you are a homebody who prefers exercising in the comfort of their own home, check out Yoga With Adriene! This free resource provides over 500 guided yoga videos that you can follow along, with a wonderfully supportive online community!