5 Undeniably Effective Exercise Tips For Getting Back Into It

Whether you’ve been forced to take a break by something concrete like an injury or a pregnancy, or you find that life just kind of got on top of you and you fell out of the habit, you’re looking for a way back. But getting back into exercising regularly can be more difficult than you think.

Michael Gerrish is a personal trainer based in Boston. In his book, Working Out Isn’t Working Out, Gerrish places the obstacles to returning to exercise in three broad categories: emotional blocks, physical challenges and improper technique. Of course those three things feed into each other.

Returning To Exercise: Obstacles

Suppose you’re a keen cyclist, but after breaking your foot in an unrelated injury, you slip from the habit. One day, you decide to get back into it. Get the bike out, get the gear on… but the tires are flat, the derailleur and the brakes need fixing, the cycling gear is all dirty (even if you can find it) — and your hour’s cycling is spent wrestling with your equipment, leaving you feeling worse than before.

Even if you overcome all that and get out on the road, you’re rusty, you get tired easily, and what used to be a pleasurable exercise of power has become an uphill struggle even on the flat. It’s discouraging.

1: Build A Habit

It takes time to build a habit. But you can start with small changes. If you normally went to the gym four times a week, go once a week. If you used to run ten miles, just run one. Don’t worry too much about outcome. Instead, focus on the process.

If you’re thinking about the outcome, you’re going to compare the outcome you get now with the one you remember getting when you were training regularly. You won’t measure up to your rose-tinted recollections of your best self, so you’ll become disappointed and frustrated. But if you think about the process, you’ll compare your actions now with your actions yesterday and see how you’re improving.

2: Focus On Quality, Not Quantity

Think about what you’re doing as practice. You’re warming up gradually. Expect aches and pains, but try to keep them to a minimum by working to do better, not more, and think about technique and movement quality rather than banging out the numbers.

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This approach also helps you avoid one of the biggest stumbling blocks to recovering your fitness: injury. You go back into the gym, and do what you used to do — but without the preparation of months or years of similar training sessions to give you the mobility, soft tissue quality and neuromuscular coordination to pull it off. So you sprain something, tear something, pop something, or just pull something. Whatever; the next time you want to go in and train, you actually feel worse. Training should be making you better, not worse, so don’t leap feet-first into something that will hurt you and stand between you and your goals.

Strategies For Getting Back Into Exercise

3: Make It Ridiculously Easy

If you used to bench 300lb and now you’re looking at maybe managing 175, that’s depressing. Look how weak you are! You’re focussing on your numbers. But what about if you make the session so easy that it’s the training, not you, that’s ridiculous? Take yourself down to the gym and bench, say, 100. Easy. Ridiculously easy. So easy, you can relax and focus on rebuilding your fitness habits, getting back into the rhythm, recovering your form, remembering how it feels. The same goes for any fitness endeavour. Run one mile. Cycle round the block. Constrict your training so you’re bursting against your self-imposed constraints, so you always finish your sessions wanting to do more. Trick yourself into building a "capital of enthusiasm" you can invest in your training.

4: Plan for Manageable Success

It takes between four and eight weeks to make a constructive difference to your body. So make a realistic goal that you can reach in that time, and build a plan that gets you there. Suppose you want to run three miles twice a week. You’re never going to manage that if you don’t run twice a week, so make that your first priority. Even if you only go around the block, hit the pavement at the appointed time. Gradually build your distances until you’re reaching your goal — with room to spare. Don’t make it a plan you can succeed at: make it a plan you can’t fail at. Build a capital of positive feeling about training that you can then reinvest in your training and in your life.

5: Boast!

Enlist the help of family and friends. Use social media to report on training sessions — OK, you probably don’t really want to boast, but it’s easy to enlist family and friends to give you supportive messages while you’re trying to improve your life. And get your training partners on board too. Tell the people you used to run or cycle with where you are and what you want, and ask them for time or tips. If you’re getting back to something organized like dance or martial arts, ask the teacher if you can spend some time in the beginner’s class going over the basics and sharing tips with the newbies before you return to the main class.

And Remember…

Everyone who’s been training for any length of time has had an injury, been laid up and come back from it. If you’re open about where you are, you’ll be surprised how many positive comments, shared stories and encouraging tips will come your way from people who really know where you’re coming from, because they’ve been there.

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If you think this is helpful, or I've missed your favorite hack, tell me in the comments section below!