The final word on how to start exercising & keep going
It takes two things.
Body Type is a place for helpful guides to feeling better in and about your body + body culture essays like this one that has over 80,000 views. If you throw me $4.17/month for an annual subscription (or $5 month) you’ll get access to this post + everything else. Thanks so much!
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First: This is the “Movement” installment of the Take Your Body Back Initiative (TYBBI). Don’t know what that is? Read here:
I’ve had to adjust the schedule of TYBBI posts as deadlines around my book take over my life, so thanks for your patience. My movement-related habit change is following a new workout plan using an app I’m loving, which I recommend below for all the reasons I’m about to explain. If you want to join me by sticking to any small change for a month, the follow-up discussion will open for paid subscribers on Aug. 30.
If they know it’s something I’ve managed to do, every so often someone will ask me how to start exercising and stick with it. It happens most often about strength training because strength training can feel so intimidating and complicated. Someone will say they know they should start, they want to, but they don’t know how. I’m delighted by the inquiry, but it’s also a How much damn time do you have? situation. If we can’t really get into it, I’d almost rather not at all; I’d hate to do a disservice to the noble art of learning to love movement.
After 10 solid years of making exercise a routine part of my life (personally and at one time, professionally), the ideal and surely most infuriating response I could offer would be a litany of questions lobbed right back: How often will you train? Are you a true beginner, or do you have some baseline experience? Do you have existing injuries or physical limitations? What are a couple specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, time-bound goals1 you can come up with, so we can create a sane, safe, sustainable plan rather than have you dive in with only “do exercise sometimes” as your guiding principle? God, how annoying, I know!
But these are the kinds of things I’d ask to effectively advise you, because there’s no one-size-fits-all plan I have printed on Body Type-branded business cards, because exercise isn’t and shouldn’t be one-size-fits all. These are the kinds of things a high-quality personal trainer or coach would ask you, and I’m not either of those. I just know from experience that meaningful change re: exercise demands a carefully considered plan, one that I can’t create in five minutes at the bustling brunch where I was last asked this question.
It was there, though, that I thought I should write a post that does begin to answer this question as best I can. That’s what this is: not an individual, tailored plan (or a generalized, unspecific one, the likes of which you probably come across online sometimes), but rather an explanation of the two things I think you should do to start building exercise of any kind into your life in a sticky, satisfying way. I did them more than a decade ago and they changed my entire body and life, and I’ve done them over and over since. They were crucial for making exercise something I love and something that made me a stronger person, not just a stronger body2. I believe in its capacity to do that so deeply that I started a newsletter with 12,000+ readers about it and then got a book deal about it. I hope that gives you reason to trust my word.
Essentially, I’m teaching you to fish rather than reeling in the prize-winning Blue Marlin for you, much as I’d like to flex my ability to heave the sonofabitch into the boat myself3. I say this with the experience of having done it wrong so many times myself before I finally did it right: Your best relationship to exercise, the one most likely to stick, will not come from following some plan I or anyone else does because you’re not sure what else to do. It will come from your own values and goals around movement, and from a deeper understanding of what you’re doing and why. It will come from the confidence you gain from establishing competence first. It will come from learning how the fishing’s done, and then from the satisfaction of doing it yourself, forever.
So, imagine sitting with me at that noisy brunch. Somehow you’ve learned that I went from someone who hated exercise with the firepower of a thousand flamethrowers to someone who used it as a means of recovering from binge eating disorder, losing a third of my body weight, becoming a certified group fitness instructor and competitive powerlifter, and turning myself into the strongest, fittest version of me in my mid 30s, right around the time when some people seem to think the muscles wither to pudding and the bones crumble to dust. You’ve been thinking about starting to exercise more, in a strength training capacity or any other, but you don’t get how to start because everything online is confusing or insane. It seems like I know a bit about what I’m doing and you think maybe I could help. So, you turn to me and ask: How do I start exercising and maybe, just maybe this time, stick with it for the long haul?
This is what I’d tell you.