Making Exercise Part of Your Life

Exercise is important. We all know it is important. At a young age, we start doing it naturally. Without thinking twice about it, we run and we play as kids. In fact, we usually have to be told to stop. Otherwise we go until we literally can’t go anymore and sleep becomes the next activity. The reason I bring this up is not to say that we get lazy as adults or that we should all quit our jobs and play all day. I bring this up because at one point, exercise was part of everything we did, but now it is something that we have to squeeze in. Or worse, it is something that we don’t have time for.

I don’t have a lot of free time during a typical day or week. Like the rest of us, a great deal of my time is spent on my career. I focus on clients and other aspects of my business for a great majority of my time. My point about that is not to brag about how busy I am, or how I can squeeze exercise in no matter how busy I am. Although that is technically true, there is a better reason for me to bring this to light.

The most important reason I can think about us focusing on our time and fitting in exercise is to see that it is not as dire as we think it is. First of all, when we were kids we loved every minute of activity. Now we look at it as a chore or task to be completed. It is easy to get caught up in the hustle and bustle. And it is easy to feel like we have no time at all for anyone or anything. What we need to do is take a step back to look at remember the following points:

- You don’t have to be training for a marathon to be active
- You don’t have to be in the gym to get exercise
- It’s the exercise you enjoy that you will keep doing

Too often we look at our routine and try to find a way to revamp it in one sweeping change. Not only is this overly difficult, but it is also not necessary. Your goal was to do more activity than you did last month, not to make the Olympic team. We think if we can’t do a world-class distance in a record-breaking time that it’s not good enough. The scary part is that when we try and fail, it only gets harder to try it again because of all the negativity.

Once you have these 3 simple points in your head, it will be much easier to make exercise part of your life. Not only will you give yourself a break from the negative thoughts, but you will also start to enjoy the exercise again. Think about it this way: What are you more likely to do tomorrow, something that you fought through and can barley do today, or something that you enjoyed and are looking forward to doing again today? It’s that simple.

So, what is the lesson here? The lesson is, to make exercise part of your life, you only need to remember the following things:

- You don’t have to be training for a marathon to be active
- You don’t have to be in the gym to get exercise
- It’s the exercise you enjoy that you will keep doing