How To Deal With "I Don't Feel Like Exercising Today"

If your exercise practice ever starts to feel too overwhelming or like you're putting too much pressure on yourself, today is the episode for you. You're going to hear some differences in perspective that you can take to your workouts and to your practice overall, and make it a little bit more fun and like an experiment.

Hey there. It's me, Kore. And you're listening to Exercising Self: From Fitness To Flourishing.

Sometimes, we can get overwhelmed with the pressure we put on ourselves to be perfect with our exercise. We try to do too much. We try to get every exercise in that we think is important; we try to do it to such a high standard that it stops being fun. Even if we're just getting started, that pressure can be there. The way I’d like you to think about it, think of exercise as just practice.

I talk about practice a lot, and we're going to use that word today. Instead of thinking of exercise, think of it as practice exercise. You're not really doing it "for real." You're just going to practice. Kind of like you would think of practicing the piano. You're not doing a recital. You're not putting on a performance in front of an audience. It's just practice. You're just going to play around a little bit. If you go into the gym or wherever it is that you exercise with that attitude, it becomes fun; it becomes an experiment.

Not every workout is going to feel good. And what I mean is you're not always going to feel motivated to do it. But if you can get yourself through the door, so to speak, your feelings will change. And even if they don’t, you can have like a "just go to work, get it done" attitude. Depending on what you do for work, you probably understand that sometimes you just go in, think, "Well, this needs to be done," and you just do it. It doesn't matter what you feel like. But then when you get going, your feelings change. Feelings do follow behavior, so you don't have to feel like it.

Then there will be days where you actually do feel really low energy; it's hard to do almost anything. But I'm speaking more specifically of "I don't think I should exercise today; I'm not feeling well." If it's debatable whether it's an actual physical illness or the brain is just trying to get you out of it…Jocko Willink, who is a retired Navy SEAL, he’s got a podcast; he’s written several books, Extreme Ownership is one. I heard that he had a really good rule for this, and I've been using it myself. He says if you ever wake up and feel like, "Well, I'm just not into it today.” The first day that you feel like that, just go in, get done what you can that day.

But if you wake up the next day and still feel the same, take the day off. Because you’ve got to figure out whether or not your brain is trying to get you out of something that you just don’t want to do, and you're trying to get past that so that it becomes a lifestyle, right? If you go in on that first day, even though you don't feel like it, your energy changes and you’re actually doing a great workout, having fun, getting the job done…well then… perfect. Your brain tried to trick you; it didn't work. You can use that experience going forward.

There are going to be days when you actually do lack time. There are just things that are a higher priority. On those days, just do what you can. Do something. Have a minimum level of exercise that you can do even on your busiest, most frustrating day. Because, in all honesty, there are days that you’re going to have priorities that outweigh exercise.

Another issue that sometimes comes up is you try to get too much done in the workout itself. It doesn't work like that, not in a single workout session nor even in a single day. You have to pick your moments, pick the means of reaching the goals that you have that are most important to you, and then do your best. Each workout is going to address certain aspects of the goals you have, and that's okay. It's not all going to get done in one fell swoop.

This podcast of mine is a good example. Even though I just started. This is the sixteenth episode, if I don't count the trailer. I think that’s right. And I think, "Oh, I didn't cover this, and I didn't cover that." And I lost the experimental fun aspect that I had gone into this with.

I started putting so much work into it, even though it’s only five to ten-minute episodes, that I was neglecting other parts of my life. And I had the goal of not overwhelming myself.

So I had to look at “what is my goal?” and re-evaluate how I was executing to achieve that goal. I thought, “You know what? I bet people are doing the same thing with their exercise.” Because I've been doing exercise so long, it took that different context of the podcast to click in. And here we are, we’ve got this episode. I hope that helps.

If you have any other perspectives that might work for somebody else or that