This is the story of how I went from a completely sedentary professional desk sitter to working out nearly *every* morning, feeling great, looking forward to what I'll achieve physically in the future.
TL;DR: if you're an over-achiever (and you know you're one if you immediately are thinking of how little you accomplish and have examples on the tip of your tongue of those who are so much more productive than you), the secret to getting yourself working out might be to do almost nothing.
The Back Story
Who I Am -- the state of affairs
I used to do tons of yoga. I manage my diet really well. So no one ever thinks I should be dieting or working out. They also think I'm fit. However, I know better: I'm a software engineer, and I never use my body. I know what it is to be strong, and I know I haven't been that in years. So about a year and a half ago I started dealing with how I was going to get strong again.
A Little Bit About Me and How I Approach Things
I'm a coach (life coach, personal coach, etc.). I've coached thousands of people over the course of more than a decade on every sort of personal and professional challenge you can imagine. In yet, here I was *stuck* when it came to working out and being fit. However, I have great mental tools from my years as a coach, so I went to work applying those tools. This story is about the mental/psychological journey I took to go from never working out to working out every morning and loving it.
Where I started
I could not get myself to work out. Not weekly, not daily, not occasionally. Not running, not weight lifting. Not in the gym, not at home, not outside. Not sports, not classes, not workout tapes. I had no interest in working out in any way, ever. And as I said, I sit at a computer all day and am approaching 40. Not moving at all, every day is just not sustainable, and while I'm approaching 40, I don't feel old at all. I certainly wasn't going to be one of those people who neglect their health until it becomes a real problem.
The Goal
This varied a bit, but generally, the first priority was nothing more than "start working out". I wanted some basal level of fitness. Feeling strong and proud of my body would be a great next step. And when I felt optimistic, I dreamed of having some of the muscle mass and tone I had in college.
Strategy
First I went to Tim Ferris and took an MED (Minimal Effective Dose) approach, ie. what is the best, shortest, most effective workout program that will reach my goals? That way I would spend such a small amount of time working out that it wouldn't matter how little I wanted to. Unfortunately, my desire not to workout was larger than I had anticipated. Not only that, my solutions were all at least 30 minutes at least a few times a week. And over the course of a few months of choosing and trying different workouts with less and less time in, trying to trick myself into wanting to workout, I was left very rarely ever working out.
Mental Tactical Interlude
When facing any problem, there are 2 directions you could go, regardless of the circumstances or strategy or mindset:
1) Set a goal and [fill in strategy here, such as "be displined" or "participate in an accountability group" or whatever], ie. do what it takes to fulfill on the goal. The unstated presupposition there is that you're not already reaching that goal, which further implies that at this moment in time, you're not very well mentally/physically constructed to fulfill the goal. You've unfortunately got to find a way to fulfill on the goal despite yourself, which leads us to the second path.
“To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” -- Socrates
2) As the Ancient Greek saying goes, "Know thyself". Get to know yourself: your inclinations, your habitual thoughts, what your current brain wiring makes you prone to, the limitations of your physical or financial environment, etc., and design an approach that *embraces* all that instead of tries to work around it or clobber it.
It as after I embraced the second approach that I started getting results... What did I realize about/admit to myself about where I was? It really all came down to: I hate working out. But I used to love yoga, so I knew that that wasn't the whole story. So I inquired deeper: What about working out sucked for me? It felt shitty. I felt stiff and never had the energy to workout. It was never invigorating. I rarely felt better afterward. It never dawned on me that that's not how it was when I loved doing yoga so much... yoga was very invigorating. It just hadn't been recently. So I started focusing on how I felt while working out. After all, my stated goal was to be healthy and feel good.
I dug a little more and found my sometimes-mischievous over-achiever brain causing trouble: every time I worked out or even sat down and envisioned my next MED workout idea, that voice in my head was in there thinking for me... things like "well you'll have to do at least this much of that" or "that won't be enough; you'll have to do this other thing also". That thought process had me reliably design a pre-conceived notion of what my workout had to look like, and--invariably--my requirements of myself were harsh enough that enacting the workout led to being exhausted or hurting and always... hating working out. But it wasn't working out I hated; it turned out it was how hard I forced myself to workout, right from Day 1 of a new workout.
The New Plan: Take It Easy
So after months of inquiry and trial and error, I finally realized that maybe all these rules and minimum requirements were the cause of me hating working out. So the new plan (which scared the shit out of my over-achiever brain because it seemed so insufficient and lazy) was this:
Do what you feel like doing and no more. You have to do something, but no more than is comfortable or enjoyable. If you do 3 pushups and feel shitty or tired, just stop. If you feel like running and half way down the block you feel like not running any more, stop running. If you don't feel like doing a real version of the ab exercise, do some lesser version of it. It doesn't matter. The goal is to do something, enjoy it, and preferably do that daily.
Personality Check In
You know you're an over-achiever if you currently hate me and think I'm lazy. But if that's you, read on, because the results speak for themselves... and I highly recommend you try this yourself.
How It Went Down
I started off around 7 or 8 pushups. I could do that much pretty reliably without feeling shitty or avoiding them. Immediately my brain tried to add in another exercise ("You should be doing abs too"). I caught it in action and reminded myself that 8 pushups a day every day would be 8 * (7 days/week) * (52 weeks) = 2912 pushups!!! It would be amazing to end the year having done that many pushups! Abs might come later, but not now. Don't screw with what works, I told my brain.
So all I did was pushups, for a month or two. Very quickly, I was doing 15-20 pushups every morning. Now we're talking 15 * 7 * 52 = 5460 pushups a year!!! And I was doing them damn-near every morning and not hating it! This was progress! and the first progress I had had in this area in a long time.
I didn't always want to do pushups, and I couldn't always do as many pushups as I had done the day before. All of that was just a practice in noticing my mind's opinion about how "little" I was doing. The more I caught that thinking and not honor it as true, the more I could focus on choosing a path that would remain enjoyable. Within about 2, maybe 3 months, I was up to 25 pushups, and I felt good doing them as well as after I was done. And I was excited to see how many I could do each morning. This excitement, of course, led to my brain trying to run with its thinking, "ok, what about the abs you haven't been doing?" "You've got this whole push-up thing, but you should be doing something for your back." "You're stopping at 12 pushups today? How the hell are you going to get anywhere stopping at 12 pushups after doing 25 yesterday?!"
I kept paying attention to that part of my brain as it essentially tried to sabotage my daily workout by making it harder or invalidating what I did enjoy doing. I kept keeping true to my plan of only doing what felt good. Now about 5 months have passed. I plateaued around 25 pushups, which I can pretty reliably do every morning. While 25 pushups ever day is awesome for me, I ended needing a week or two to really come to grips with the fact that it's fine that I plateaued there. 25 pushups is awesome... 25 * 7 * 52 = 9100 pushups a year.
The Best Outcome
Most notably, I began feeling more vital, sometimes even what I might cheekishly call "spritely". This vitality was what I was most scared of when I lost. I had never felt so weak that I just didn't want to work out at all. Now, that vitality had returned, and working out had become easy again. In retrospect, I think I circumvented that period that most people go through when they start working out again after a long time out of the game... that hard period where every workout sucks for a few weeks until you whip your body into a minimal level of fitness. I skipped that by just letting my body warm up to the idea slowly and at a pace that didn't make it a miserable experience. This boost in vitality unexpectedly led to doing a static ab exercise spontaneously one day. I just suddenly, one day, wanted to add that exercise. Of course, right there to chime in was that over-achiever part of my brain, which I had to ignore again; it was yelling about the number of reps and how long I held the pose for and whatnot. I just noticed it and told myself to keep going at whatever pace was comfortable.
The static ab exercise was hard enough (and unpleasant enough), that I backed off to Tim Ferris' "cat vomit" ab-suck-in exercise (only as many reps as was comfortable). This exercise is less stressful/more comfortable.
Next, I spontaneously started doing a tiny bit of cardio because I felt so vital that I really felt like getting the blood flowing. Now, to be clear, we're not talking about 20 minutes on the treadmill or a half hour run. We're talking about jumping, for no more than 2 minutes... simple, short, comfortable.
After about a month and a half of pushups, ab-suck-in exercise, and cardio, I felt so good that I was ready to tackle pull-ups. Now pull-ups are just plain harder. Lifting my entire body weight is just harder. I can do 2 or 3 pretty comfortably and a max of maybe 8, but the mental resistance was pretty high. So I assured myself 2 or 3 was plenty.
This almost brings us up to the present. I'm now doing the following quite happily and pretty consistently, damn near every day:
- 25 pushups
- 2 sets of 3-6 pull-ups
- ab-suck-in exercise (5-10 reps, 8-10 seconds each)
- 2-ish minutes of "cardio"
- and about half the time, rows, using one of those over-the-door strap setups.
And Now?
I feel like I'm living the dream. I am now "that guy" who just gets up and works out every morning. I rarely miss a day, and I feel great. I very rarely get sore while sitting/working. I rarely have any kind of stiffness or soreness. My posture is improving bit by bit. I've even started to focus on different aspects of my workout with the purpose of impacting my posture.
I'm proud of what I've accomplished, and most surprisingly, I'm very much looking forward to what I'll achieve in the future. I'm super confident that my stats will only get better, and I'm so happy with my current stats, that there's no over-achiever rush to get wherever the hell I'm going. In fact, I love the definition of mastery as a journey of infinite length: sure you'll get good at something along the way, but the master doesn't stop; she continues to explore, grow, and be in the inquiry of what's next.
So if you're not working out and you know you should and you really don't want to, just do something. Then keep doing something. It really doesn't have to be more complicated than that.
I'd love to hear your thoughts and stories. Please post them in the comments below.
To Your Health!