Fitness Obstacle: Boredom May 6, 2006
This post is part of the Fitness Obstacles series.
Any kind of repetitive exercise just gets boring after a few sessions. This is a killer for many people, and they can’t ever seem to keep themselves motivated to keep up with the exercise. That’s certainly the case for me.
In the past I’ve tried swimming laps, walking/jogging, going to the gym, stair climbers, treadmills, exercise bikes, aerobics and more. But none of them occupy my mind or have any apparent purpose, so I always feel like there’s something else I could be doing that’s less boring, more fun, or more productive.
We know in our minds that the exercise is doing us long-term good, but there’s no immediate payoff to each activity. It just feels like something to be endured, which certainly doesn’t help with getting motivated before each session. It’s easy to just skip a session because there are better things to be doing. And while skipping individual sessions probably doesn’t make much of a difference to your overall fitness level, it’s a habit that eventually leads to giving up on exercise completely.
Consequently, many of us never reach the stage where exercise has become a part of our weekly routine. We give up before it becomes an ingrained habit. Because we don’t stick with it for long enough, we never get good enough or fit enough with any of these activities that we feel like we’re achieving anything. We’re was just filled with dread beforehand, and the session is uncomfortable, painful and exhausting.
Thinking back, the fittest I’ve been was when I was involved in several social sporting activities many years ago. For a few years, I was playing various combinations of roller hockey, indoor hockey, outdoor hockey and netball on different nights of the week. So I was doing a lot of running and moving around, enjoying myself, and getting quite fit. I didn’t get bored with these sports, as we were always working to achieve some outcome – scoring, stopping the other team from scoring, winning the game, getting the ball to our shooter, etc.
Team sports are great for putting the fun and motivation back into exercise, but for people with young families they’re not really practical. Problems include:
- You’d need to be involved in at least two or three different activities in order to get a decent amount of weekly exercise, and most of us simply don’t have that much free time in the evenings.
- Social sports come with various extra commitments (training, umpiring for others’ games, etc) that we don’t have time for.
- Game times tend to vary all over the place – one week you’ll be playing at 6:30pm, and the next you might be playing at 8:30pm, which doesn’t fit in with the demands of a young family very well.
- You don’t feel you can make a commitment to the other team members to be able to play every week for the whole season – for various reasons, there would be times that you couldn’t make it to a game and you’d be letting the team down. You need flexibility, or at least some control over the schedule, which you simply can’t have when other people are involved.
- If you have a partner, you’d probably feel guilty going out and playing games while your significant other has to stay home with the kids.
All this sounds like a list of excuses, but boredom is a genuine demotivator for many people (including myself). If that’s true for you, it needs to be addressed if you want to start a regular exercise routine and be able to stick with it over the longer term.
Technorati Tags: fitness, health, exercise, boredom, exercise routine, workout, excuses
- Posted in : Fitness Obstacles
- Author : admin
Comments»
Very true! My most recent solution to this problem is to sign up for race events: that gives you a goal to train for, which is very motivating, but the flexibility to train when you have time. Morning run one day, evening weight lifting another, etc. You can even train with other people, but there’s no guilt associated with missing sessions because it doesn’t preven the other people from training.
That’s a good idea, Holly. I’m thinking of entering a 14 km run coming up in August. At the moment I can probably run about 5 km, but I’ve got a couple of months to build that up. I can also stop a few times for a breather during the race – it’s not like I’m going to win it anyway!