There has to be another way

This has never happened to me. I still hate it and I run at least 18 miles a week for going on twenty years. I feel like shit if I don’t run, but I still hate the actual activity.

Even when I was young and healthy, I never looked forward to exercise and it never improved my mental health, even when people insisted that I do it all the time. I would always feel in a mental fog for the rest of the day after exercise. Any day without exercise and I was (and still am) very sharp mentally.

And then you get to the weird addiction space where I feel guilty if I haven't gone for a run in 2 days. Humans are weird.

I love walking, my family has a farm and I grew up there playing walking and doing just the usual villager kid stuff. 20 years later and I love walking. I almost always walk on the way to home from work after taking the train (about 2.5 km) my friends call me crazy but it just feels good to walk and get lost in music and thoughts for half an hour or so everyday.

Damn I'm feeling you. I'm in the fall process (solidly down 15kg/33lb, approaching 20kg/44lb) with about 10-15kg to go. When my belly stops flapping I'm good I think. But I fear the rebound... Currently lots of my evening snacking have disappeared because of evening gym classes, so late home and even later dinner. So I don't have time anymore to get snacky. Or if I do it's almost bedtime anyway so I'll just go to bed instead.

But once I've hit my goal and don't need to hit gym that hard anymore... That frightens me. A little bit at least. Made some good connections there and got a routine going so i can probably keep it up.

Just take drugs. Problem solved!

The only time I've ever felt the "runner's high" they keep talking about was in the mosh pit at a concert, and I think the music and crowd did more for it than the activity.

Sadly, the local YMCA doesn't have mosh sessions available.

I started weight lifting and intermittently doing cardio (intermittently because it's boring and I hate it). It fixed basically all the random aches and pain shit I was having but I also never got any endorphins out of it. I look good naked though so there's that.

Just find a form of exercise that you actually enjoy, running and going to the gym aren't the only options...

Whack. The only thing I can think of is if your base activity level has never been low enough in that several year period, you might not know what it feels like to be completely sedentary by comparison?

Damn that sucks. For me it was pretty subtle. Like I would tell myself "well at least my body feels pretty good" even though the rest of me wasn't. And then I started to notice that I wasn't feeling as bad as I normally was.

And then I have had some slices of actually feeling good after 30-60 minutes intense cardio + rajma masala on rice, but maybe I just got lucky.

Definitely feeling more sore in my joints though. Stretching and limiting workouts to 2-3 times a week helps some with aches and pains in my experience.

How long have you been at it? It took me a few months before it started to even feel like a habit I could keep up

EDIT: oh you said years. Dannng, have you tried switching it up? Maybe talk to a doctor?

I don't really get endorphin highs from running. But what it does do is make teenager level randy.

When I work out all the blood leaves my brain, it's a medical thing my family has. I stay thin by just eating very little.

I feel that. Just imagine how bad it would feel if you weren't doing any of that exercise.

Yeah… this shit’s killing me. If walking improves your “chronic pain” you were just lazy and out of shape 🤣

Eating well is even lower effort, but inversively fun.

I don't really like cycling, but I've found I dislike driving more, so replacing car trips w/ bike trips has worked really well. I get exercise, save money, I get better parking spots, and I'm not stuck in a stupid car. Oh, and I'm quite competitive, so I like to see how quickly I can get from A to B, so my heartrate stays high.

I also have gymnastic rings in my garage for my upper body. I'm not a fan of that either, but it at least feels cooler than lifting weights. So I'll alternate between doing errands on my bike and using the gymnastic rings.

I'm the opposite. Never much liked sports, and when I am not held to a pace like a treadmill does, I'll not maintain enough heart rate elevation.

So, for me, if I don't get to the gym a couple of times a week, I fall well short of the NIH guidelines.

The full report is quite clear that heart rate elevation is the most significant population-wide contributor.to general health. 150 "points" per week, which you can in theory knock out with one long (~75 minutes) high-intensity work out.

Resistance training across all major muscle groups is secondary, and really only needs one set, on two separate days each week. Your don't need to build bulk or anything, just keep then fully active. Add some weight if you could do an extra set before exhaustion.

Stretching is good, in particular if you don't reach a range of motion, you are likely to lose it as you age, but no specific recommendations are given

Gym allows me to safely play sports, run around after the dog, swim without feeling like drowning is inevitable etc

I'm not a gym nut by any stretch of the imagination but as I approach middle age I can't be as spontaneous with breaking into a run or lifting heavy things. Too many injuries and anatomical idiosyncracies have built up over the years.

The gym maintains all my muscles so I can use them when I want without injury. It's made a big difference going about 2-3 times a week for 45 min. Then I can do all the stuff I enjoy (mostly all outdoors) without worrying about a tweak or a joint blow out.

I biked to work every day as my only regular exercise and was relatively happy with my body and endurance - COVID taking that away by turning my job remote only really showed me how important that daily activity is - first time in my life signed up for a fitness studio after those could open again.

Yep, I get no positive feelings from exercise. I do it to keep my blood pressure down and I fucking hate it. People say after a while it begins to feel good and you look forward to it and I want to punch all those people in the face. I started about 4 months ago and I've hated every day I've gone.

Exercise fucking sucks. I get hot and sweaty and feel like shit afterwards. The only positive emotion is a vague sense of relief that it's over when I'm finished.

"Jogging is the worst. I mean, I know it keeps you healthy; but God, at what cost?" -Ann Perkins

The thing to adapt to with this information is goal maintainence, and improvement tracking.

I HATE exercise, PLUS the humilation aspect that got pushed into me growing up as a fat kid.

The thing that gives one good feelings for me, isn't the exercise, it's the improvement that gives/gave me pride.

Instead of group exercise, I started doing bouldering. Going up the difficulty levels, being able to literally get over obstacles made me feel proud of my achievements.

Try tracking progress. it could help give you pride and self esteem.

If the effects were truly the same, I’d rather drink a few coffees a day than go for a walk. It’s faster and tastes better.

.... lol.

This is the advice (audiobook) I heard way back and it worked for me. Specifically, I listen to podcasts, but only when I'm working out or comminuting to the workout.

Eventually you get invested in whatever you're listening to and want to just listen to it, but the workout limitation means you have to make time for exercise before you get your fix.

She's also just top notch in general. Her and her ridiculously charming pet pig Rufus (pictured below) are two of main things I miss from Twitter..

I was hoping you would say "unnaturally contorted in a desk chair for 8-10 hours per day"

Those numbers are off, and there's some studies showing that what people simplify to "chilling out" was also work, just done in groups back at the settlement. For example, preparing the animal you caught for eating, using the tools of the era, takes time. Unfortunately there are a lot of people understanding only the bare bones cliffnotes of historic life, then using it as fuel for their (justified but somewhat misinformed) campaign against the workload expected of us in modern life.

That said, the general take away is correct: humans used to be far more active in the completion of their daily duties.

Back when we lived to the ripe old age of 38.

(Im kidding, I know that was mostly due to infection and whatnot)

10kg of salad...are you a young hippopotamus?

Well what ELSE do you eat? Adding salad and not removing other stuff will not do much. And what do you drink?

People who try to start an exercise activity very commonly do too much their first time(s) at it, and end up injuring themselves or hurting too much which makes it hard to continue and even harder to start doing it again after they inevitably quit. The best thing to do is to start with something absurdly small - like biking a half-mile, walking (or running) 200 feet, or driving to the gym and then driving home without even going inside - and then very gradually ramp things up. The most important thing is to establish exercising as a regular habit, and then worry about turning it into actual physically effective exercise later on.

I dislike exercising, I often have to "parent" myself into starting, I have to fight the urge to stop several times during a session, and I almost always feel worse immediately after. Sore, tired, sweaty, or various other uncomfortableness, and I haven't found a recovery activity that erases that temporary badness.

But, my life when I'm not exercising has gotten better, and it's at least partially due to the exercise.

I'm not sure why but I find pretty much all excercise mind numbingly boring. I found that walking my dog in the park is a lot more stimulating mentally because you gotta look out for your little critter and she always does interesting things. The only thing is she gets cold easily so I can only walk her properly in the summer...

Dog tax: https://imgur.com/a/rEII2ih

Unfortunately it's not that simple. :(

I grew up in the country and I don't mind the shit you're talking about at all, but I never got this whole zen bullshit thing people claim to get from it lol. Wood needs to get cut, I cut it. GG.

100% agree. It's practically meditation. I grew up a little more country, and I miss clearing out trees and brush, then making a burn pile for the stuff you're not keeping as firewood.

The whole process is cathartic.

😥

“hella crazy exercise… doing this horse stuff”

Just the idea of not doing something that you are doing makes you depressed?

I’d stretch for 60 seconds and call it good

I used to stretch for 30 to 45 minutes before a run (5K to 10K) and I still found the running part to be incredibly painful. I couldn't understand why I found running to be so unpleasant when 50 mile bike rides were no problem for me, and I eventually considered the fact that I never stretched or warmed up at all before a bike ride. I tried not stretching before a run and the pain went away. There is a growing view in exercise physiology that static stretching before strenuous activity is not good for you.

I'm 44 now, and last year I did a 5K every day for 28 days in a row. It was overdoing it, but I was trying to get in my best shape ever and it helped.

The Kurzgesagt video is fine, but the NIH exercise guidelines are actually better for deciding how much and what exercise to do.

At least you're getting some ducks

I used to exercise quite a lot, I know what the runners high feels like and how being sore and able to use motion and stretching to alleviate the soreness felt so good. I could easily lose myself when I exercised.

I don't get that anymore. I have bad joint pains, I never get that high feeling anymore, and everything is a distraction. I want to go back, but whatever happy chemicals used to work no longer do and what's left over makes the whole endeavor feel the opposite.

The expression you can't outrun your fork has hit me hard. I'm up 30lbs since I started running a decade ago, some of it's muscle, but most is I just need to eat better.

I just didn't gain weight all of my life until my 40s no matter what I did, so I think that's just y/our biology.

From what I've been hearing lately, exercise might not cause you to lose much weight. There was a kurzgesact video giving a vulgarisation about it anyway, so take that as you will.

But exercise is still really really good for you, especially your mood. Just don't count on it alone if you have other body goals

Swimming maybe? Is that an option?

That sounds like a disability and definitely is not normal. Far from a "counter-example", especially when the overwhelming evidence is that being sedentary IS harmful

I'm sorry that your experience has been crappy. And yes, not all strong exercises are great for everyone.

Still, there are advantages for not being sedentary and being active, as in light exercises does not have to disable you for days. You should look into that as it is not necessarily common.

It differs per person.

I can walk rather long distances even if sick, but that's because I've been doing that a lot in my childhood. Not so often today - but the parts about correct posture and movements and breathing rhythm are still very useful.

Try with something so small that you don't even get tired, just feel heated up a bit. Do it every day. When that effect stops being notable, increase the load so you feel it again. Keep doing that, and in 3 months your life should be better.

Of course, I've never been able to keep doing something regularly, so this is just repeating advice often heard (and correct in terms of your body, but not in terms of executive dysfunction and what it does to one's ability to exercise regularly).