I’m here seeking advice from those further along in their fitness journey than I am about the mental aspect of fitness as well as about some concrete knowledge. I’m a beginner and in the past I’ve had a lot of success in staying pretty consistent. 90% of anything is showing up. A golden rule for beginners is find an exercise you love doing and then you’ll show up for it.

That’s great advice. But there’s limits, right? If you want to get strong you’ll just…have to do some stuff you don’t like. I can’t jut play soccer all day, not least because the weather or outside forces don’t permit it.

So there’s another complementary approach: habit formation, and this is mostly what I rely on. In fact, I see a lot of people talk about how they hate their exercise (running and rowing especially) but they do it anyway–this abilty is inscrutable to me except in light of environmental conditions & habit. The point is that my life and environment are engineered where it’s almost the path of least resistance to do my workout plan. I don’t love, own, or identify with the workout program I do except by identifying with (1) the successes when I pull it off and (2) the fact that it’s incidentally a part of my daily life–I identify with it the same way I identify with any other incidental habit in my life, like my commute, which I don’t love or have sentimentality about otherwise. I think there is a subtle emotional cost to ragdolling yourself like this but it’s more than worth it because of all of the practical benefits of exercise as well as the feeling of accomplishment.

But, the key word earlier being…almost the path of least resistance. And I think when inevitably Life Happens ™ and the habit is broken the emotional cost of ragdolling has to be paid. Once the habit is broken and the path of least resistance is simply to not, the identification-by-habit is gone by definition bc the habit no longer exists, and the identification-by-success is gone because there’s been a failure. There are a few ways I can respond to this situation, I think:

• Be forced to keep going. Extremely hard, virtually impossible, to force oneself against both the inherent difficulty of an exercise you don’t love and the emotional baggage of having failed. To get back on track with the next day of the program is…very hard. Possible with a PT or gym buddy or other support but assume one doesn’t have this.
• Summon up self-compassion out of thin air to void the aforementioned emotional baggage. This is basically as inscrutable to me as saying “cast a magic spell to solve the problem.” What? How? Everything only works by the logic of effort and reward. God can give grace, I don’t think I have that power wthin me.
• Go back a few steps in the program and ease oneself back in. Gentleness and momentum. Very sensible and I think extremely doable when there is an impetus to do anything, anything at all.
• Put a break on the current program and find other ways to move and develop a loving, joyful relationship with one’s body and exercise. I think this, too, is a great idea. But because I’m a beginner, the advice I’ve been given is just “pick a tried-and-tested program and follow it.” I don’t really want to pick another effective but similarly impersonal program, that doesn’t solve the ragdolling problem. But I don’t just wanna flail around and do things that have no benefit to me whatsoever and risk backsliding entirely on the gainszsz I do have.

So, two questions: any responses to how I look at working out/programming, does this reflect your own perspectives earlier in your journey or now? And: how do I assess what to pick for joyful, loving, reparative, but still-effective movement? When it comes to food, there are lots of micronutrients and flavours that can guide my decision-making. When it comes to movement, is it the set of muscles I move? Is it the type of movement (squat, row, etc)? Is it the quality of the movement (power, etc)? Where do people learn this stuff?

#fitness