I was so tempted to skip the run. By the time my five Zoom meetings were done, it was getting dark and the sky was spitting sleet. Still, I headed out the door, because my last call of the day had been with a couple of professional runners, each with national championship titles in distance running under their belt. A physician, Dr. Megan Roche, and her husband, David, had encouraged me to think of my workout as recess after a long day of work, rather than another item on my to-do list.
"I struggle with motivation all the time," David Roche said. What gets him over the hump is finding joy in the activity itself. Sometimes it helps to get a little silly, he said. "It sounds ridiculous, but if you're running down a slight hill or even just tired, put your arms out like you're an airplane and suddenly everything become less serious."
It did sound silly, but when I tried the airplane arms trick, my dark, cold run became surprisingly joyful. Here are some other ways you can find inspiration and maybe even a little glee in your daily workout.
Don't think of it as exercise
When exercise isn't appealing, making it feel like something else can help. Crystal Steltenpohl, a psychologist at the University of Southern Indiana, Evansville, who studies exercise motivation, recalls a participant in one of her studies who said, "I go play basketball, but that's just hanging out with friends." In other words, although the activity qualified as exercise, that was just a fringe benefit, rather than the motivating factor.
"If you ask, most people will say they want to exercise for their health, and that's a great goal," said Katie Heinrich, an exercise scientist at Kansas State University. "But what gets people actually moving is doing something they enjoy." There's no perfect activity for everyone. "How do you like to move?" Heinrich said. "Maybe it's dancing, or it could be a walk in the park. For some people, it might be CrossFit or Peloton."
Bundle your incentives
Researchers recently published a megastudy testing the effectiveness of 54 approaches to motivating people to exercise more. The experiment, which enlisted more than 60,000 members of the 24 Hour Fitness chain as test subjects, found that offering a free audiobook was one of the most effective ways to get people to the gym. The idea was to give participants something to look forward to while exercising, said one of the study's organizers, Katy Milkman, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and author of the book "How to Change: The Science of Getting From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be."