Learning to exercise

A personal reflection

Why I didn’t exercise

It is hard to articulate the full extent of my lack of physical activity in the last 15 years. I remember learning about three-toed sloths in primary school. I think they can grow algae and moss on their fur that then encourages insects to thrive and the sloths can eventually eat the insects - they are essentially an entire ecosystem of non-movement. I think this might have been what I was working towards.

Unlike a sloth, I was a very busy working person with many creative pursuits - but like a sloth, high intensity exercise was not something observant scientists would attribute to me.

Photo by Sebastian Molinares on Unsplash

When I was growing up, exercise wasn’t something I was encouraged to do. I was more encouraged towards things that would help the household, homework and watching TV, playing computer games and movies to relax.

I love my parents and siblings very much, and embrace all the complexity of their respective personages. They are my Earthly people, who have taught me many things about love, humanity and I am deeply connected to them. They all have disabilities and workplace injuries, so for them limiting their physical movement wasn’t a lifestyle choice, it is genuinely harder for them to move around than it is for me. Moving freely without pain is something they would all love to be able to do. Choosing to move so that you could have sore muscles sounds crazy - sayings like “no pain, no gain” and “just do it” are absurd to them. They often have chronic pain and take a multitude of medications to relieve them. Part of my own decision to not move around much might have something to do with not wanting to join the family tree of injuries, permanent disability and chronic back, hip and knee issues.

In addition to that, I have always felt disconnected from my own body, even as a kid. I’ve always felt a much stronger connection to me as a mind and a soul than my body. There are a bunch of factors that might contribute to why I thought like that, but by the time I was an adult, the world and I were in agreement that my value in the world was my brain. My ideas, writings and intellectual pursuits and outputs somewhat defined me as a person.

It would be fair to accuse me sometimes of living too much in my head – thinking too much, spending too much of my time percolating thoughts and pretending to be clever. I like thinking, I read a lot and try to absorb a lot of information and I feel I need the processing time to reflect, on a constant journey towards hopefully creating something of value and meaning one day.

Personally, my values were always about trying to put others first, which you could argue is another way of saying that I did not value myself, and always put myself last. But looking back it was described positively a lot as being selfless and caring. Other people and things - both deserving and undeserving were always higher on my priority list. For the good and bad parts of being like this, it is how I think, and despite being burned a few times and exhausted by it on occasion it was an ideal I aspired to and one I tried to live.

Flowing on from this, I definitely held strong views about the best way to spend what I deemed “spare time.” Spending it relaxing with people I cared about was high on the list. Cuddling on the couch, eating delicious snacks binge watching a TV show or movie was definitely my preferred way to spend my time. Something I have continued to enjoy, there is still time in the day and it isn’t the one or the other trade off I thought it was - even if the snacks might have changed and reduced.

When it came to challenging myself to achieve goals, I think I had decided that I had already done all my hurdle leaping, obstacle work and necessary life stunts just to survive. I was “never meant to” do things so many times before I was 30, that by that age, I can admit I was a bit damaged and broken, and was mostly out of miracles and tricks. I knew I could do things, and push myself to achieve outcomes and had overcome a lot. Most of these experiences are not things I like having to re-live and tell. Part of my own reward for surviving is not having to be defined by it, getting to look forwards without needing to be reminded of it constantly as part of the ‘poverty porn’ the upper middle classes are constantly tantalised to hear. I know I am supposed to get a shot of pride from the Sisyphean re-telling, and the assurances and commendations of me as one who has “made it out” and that I am indeed a conqueror of demons and monsters.

But to not exercise ever, you need a complete list of reasons, and I had others. I had also decided that there was a certain vacuity in people who spent lots of time working on themselves and their physical appearance. To me they were like human budgerigars always preening in the mirror, hoping to avoid the realisation they were in a cage. I would think the world was full of jobs that required people to do physically demanding tasks, choosing to do it before or after work seemed counterintuitive and a strange way to insult people who had to sweat to make a living. Worse still I thought were those who let their chosen movement activities define who you they are as a person in society: eg. as a runner, a swimmer, and worst of all - a cyclist.

I had observed that people who exercised did seem to derive happiness from it, so in that context it made sense. But some seemed very pleased with themselves in a way that I thought went past that, and their content with their lives seemed disconnected from reality. I always felt it was a more correct response for a human existing in reality to feel discontent with the world, and it was a more justifiable intellectual position to be malcontent with most of life. I existed on way too much coffee, and had too much to think about and do everyday. It wasn’t helpful to me to think like this, I often couldn’t switch my brain off, and in a world of hungry people fleeing for their lives, it seemed privileged and idiotic to gloat about intermittent fasting and a personal best on the treadmill.

It is important for me to acknowledge that my thinking was unhelpful and wrong - but I don’t want people reading this not understanding where I was coming from in my thinking.

But supposing everything I used to think was accurate or right in some ways, or the list of italicised reasons were sometimes valid: what does this perception and judgment of the world and others in it have to do with my own health, movement and well-being? Nothing at all. So I am prepared to accept that all of these thoughts were the well developed unhelpful opinions of someone who spent too much time thinking of reasons why they couldn’t ever do any exercise.

Trying to change my thinking

It wasn’t that there weren’t thoughts of trying to start to exercise or eat better during that time. Decisions were made to start to try and do things at different stages, but spending time with family and friends, studying, working, writing, all the reasons found a way to win. Not all the reasons not to start were always trivial, sometimes the circumstances and events would de-rail anyone for a time - I was just ‘lucky’ that they always happened around the time I was about to start to exercise.

The start of 2024 saw me approaching my 45th birthday, and I was sure that by totally ignoring anything to do with diet, exercise and health was beginning to have tangible consequences on me. Being set in my thoughts and actions and having a fixed mindset about certain parts of my existence outside of the impact to myself, were also impacting how people around me were thinking and acting in response to my advice and guidance.

I love that my kids have my eyes - they are actually something I got from my Nanna - they are easily my best feature. It was also good to know that both my kids are very intelligent. I was less excited that they had adopted some of my tendencies to overthink, and have a fixed mindset about who they were and what they did. But without them ever seeing me demonstrate that each day it is possible to try new things and do things you aren’t good at, to incrementally get better at them, and see that I also believed that things you don’t like, you might actually eventually develop skills in or come to appreciate or enjoy didn’t ring true for them.

I’d told them that there are some jobs and tasks that are hard when you start doing them, that not everything that you come to love, or that is valuable to your existence comes naturally to you when you begin. My parental advice about applying yourself to practice is how learning, change, the results weren’t having the intended effect. I was repeatedly telling them that not all human activities are immediately exciting and interesting to you: eating your vegetables, taking your medicine, overcoming challenges and that changing your mind and narratives of self is incremental not transformational - I’d said it to them so many times, maybe I started to hear myself saying it, and I started to think that I didn’t believe it to be true about myself. I assume they didn’t believe me either, it was “easy” for me to say, but if it was that easy, why wasn’t I doing it?

My New Year’s Resolution for 2024 wasn’t directly linked to exercise, bit was inclusive of it. I wanted to try and ask myself: “what if I existed in a no excuses environment?”. Each time I told myself that I can’t or shouldn’t or that I haven’t or won’t - what if I reframed it to remove the excuse or obstacle and started to say that to myself instead. Or what if I just put the thought to the side and started doing it anyway?

It was in the early part of this mindset challenge, in an effort to embrace it, and to try and spend more time with my partner, and set a good example for my kids (I knew myself well enough to know I had to make it about other people), that I started going to F45.

Starting to exercise

I knew going would be hard, but what I didn’t know is that it would cause the overwhelming anxiety it did. Each day as I walked towards the gym, it would start to happen, and it was not something that was easy to define, describe and it was difficult to just ignore it and walk in. Once I was inside the studio, it was hard to stay there as I knew I was surrounded by people and finding it difficult to talk and engage - I was using all of my energy just to try and not leave that it made normal human things impossible and in the early sessions it was constant and wouldn’t subside until I had left the building. I didn’t hang around for high fives and fist bumps, I almost bolted out the door. In most social settings I don’t like when people raise their voice, and worry about how I react when people are yelling at or near me. It sometimes makes it hard to go to markets where sellers yell, or concerts or classes where instructors inspire you through voluminous encouragement.

I was also worried about dropping dead - actually. It wasn’t simply a feeling like I was out of my comfort zone - it was an intense and irrational response that constricted my brain and body and I had little control over it at first. It was a feeling that I was somewhere that I shouldn’t be and somewhere that I did not belong, and I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. It took two or three weeks to begin to work through, and in the early stages it felt like a stupid thing to put myself through, not the exercise part, but the stress and anxiety part. I could have definitely used it as an excuse to stop going and I got frustrated by it because it makes me feel stupid and hopeless and not in control, and who wants to feel those things?

The notion of doing functional exercises, focused on making everyday real-life activities easier to do appealed to me theoretically, but I think it was something I had decided I would never actually do. Improving flexibility and movement and increasing aerobic fitness sounded like a good idea for everyone, including me – and so F45 was way more appealing than figuring out how to rigidly lift heavy things in a room full of mirrors as bulky humans in singlets took their protein shake for a stroll around the gym.

A few weeks into my starting to go to classes, my anxiety levels had dropped from a 9/10 to a 7, and I saw the F45 gym had started to advertise that it was doing a 6-week challenge. The focus of the challenge was on improving the consistency of your diet, exercise, drinking water and sleeping - all things deep down I wanted to do. But I told myself that there was no way I was doing it, that it was not something for me, it was a bit too much into the cult for someone like me, and I was barely able to get through a class without wanting to leave, and I wasn’t sure I was going to keep going. So then I had to challenge these thoughts too, reframe them and then signed up to introduce some external accountability and a short term time bound goal to work towards to keep me focused and motivated.

Starting to learn about myself by exercising

I would hesitate to tell anyone that they should do what I did, or follow me to the mountain top. Messiahs and martyrs are often snake oil salesmen and charlatans. But I have written all of the first bit you’ve read to help paint a picture of how far away I am from being any sort of person who normally preaches on pathways to fitness and wellbeing. I don’t want to share this as a list of advice that someone who is already fit and already has everything figured out thinks it should be done.

Neither do I want to say it as someone who has now finished doing something. I am in the very early stages, and am mostly writing this so I can remember what my thoughts were, where they are and to remind myself of what is working for me now, hoping it is useful for myself and others at other stages of the journey.

“Just show up”

Thinking about what was going to happen when I got to class, how hard it would be just to go there, who would or wouldn’t be there, what exercises would be done, even how I didn’t like dance beats under my favourite Nirvana and Rage Against the Machine songs, how stupid I would look and feel as I fumbled around uncoordinated and sucking at exercises in 45 minute batches – all of these thoughts were persistent and were not something I could allow myself to get lost in. I had constant anxiety and thoughts that this “wasn’t me” or “wasn’t for me”. I was also thinking about the other things that I “should” be doing, some days it was stupid cold or raining, there were days I forgot my towel or a water bottle – extra evidence I should just stop, because I was failing at the basics. When all of these thoughts were raining down in my brain, I turned on my mind wipers, and simply said “Just show up and do it, and then it is done.” F45 is a class format that suits this, as the circuit is there, you do the warm up and then you just move around the stations as the timer goes off. The 45 minutes sometimes drags and some days it passes more quickly. As often as I had the thoughts, I would repeat to myself, that all I had to do was just show up. It was my first mantra during this time, trying to stop the other thoughts and focus on one.

Small, daily goals will add up

The good thing about the challenge was it was built around doing the 45 minutes of training, drinking 2L of water, sleeping 7hrs and eating the set meals/calories each day and ticking off each of the four boxes each day as you went. I had to set a goal for the whole 6 week challenge, but that sounded absurd and ridiculous and unattainable to me. But I told myself everyday that I could definitely try and tick the 4 boxes today.

The sleep and drinking water ones were actually harder for me to start doing than the exercise and food ones. I could remember to go to the class, but I would forget to drink water, and was used to running on about 4-5 hours of sleep when I was not exercising, so these were hard habits to form, but I wanted to honestly tick the box, so I started to do it. As I started exercising, my sleep improved naturally and as I drank more water, I was drinking fewer caffeinated drinks in a day. I would still have a couple of cups of coffee and tea in a day, but before the challenge, it was getting a bit out of hand, and probably not helping me sleep. Some people are motivated by vision boards and wanting to do a triathlon or some larger goal, but I really struggle to plan ahead more than what is right in front of me to do in a day when it comes to me. I can be long term and strategic in my work, but personally, it is not how my brain works. Still I set a goal of trying to lose 5kg in the 6 weeks, but as I wrote it down, I was telling myself there was no chance it would happen.

Be grateful

To stop my constant negative thoughts during class, I had to replace them with other thoughts, or the negative ones would just loop and take over. So I started saying in my head in class whenever they started: “I am grateful that I can move around and do exercise.” It was partly not true, but I would think of my family and people who would love to be able to move around even as badly as I did, and tried to tell myself to be grateful. When I was in class, and I was hating it and I didn’t want to be there, the trainers were yelling, the music wasn’t to my taste, the people before me didn’t wipe down the bench, or put the weights back properly, or any of the things that your brain tells you are bad and justify your bad mood or feeling like today just wasn’t my day. If I wasn’t enjoying the class or exercise I was doing, I would say to myself: “I am grateful that I can move around and do exercise” – the first time I said it, my brain would reject it and not listen, so I would say it again, and again, over and over until the competing thoughts gave up. Deep down I knew I was, but your brain isn’t always the helpful Jiminy Cricket it should be, so I would just keep saying it, and now my brain reminds me of it regularly when I’m feeling a bit sore after a class, or struggling during a class - it is still a helpful mantra.

Exercise is addictive

Addiction is often primarily discussed in terms of negatives: drugs, alcohol, smoking, sugar, eating, etc. Addicts are also often described and categorised by how they respond to the absence of their addiction - how badly it effects them and what happens when they can’t get their “hit”. I had heard of a “runner’s high” and thought it sounded made up by people who’d never had an actual chemical dependence. This is something that did not happen in the first few weeks, but having been described as someone with an “addictive personality”, it helped me to think that if I kept doing it, I might get addicted to it. It took most of the challenge before it started to happen, but eventually the endorphins, dopamine and serotonin resulting from exercise started to connect in my brain. You can get addicted to positive habits, biological, psychological and environmental factors connected to exercise - and you can also get addicted to exercising. I was slowly getting addicted to going, and like any addict, something didn’t feel right in my mind and body when I didn’t go.

The value of others

While it started as a journey and story in my head about me working on myself - a big learning for me has been about connecting and appreciating others. My wife and daughter have been constant supports, encouragers and motivators. But before I started, part of what made it seem impossible was telling myself that I didn’t have enough in my tank to do everything that was required. But I took motivation from other people in classes struggling to do exercises but persisting anyway. Watching people who knew what they are doing set a good example in form or reps and attitude to class I took a lot from. I also grew to appreciate the trainers, who while sculpted as super-fit gods and goddesses in appearance - are authentic, genuine people. Their care, encouragement, support, humour, and even sometimes their dancing around in class - helped me enormously to connect back with people, and change how I thought about people who love exercise and derive joy from working out.

Challenging myself during the challenge

I decided if I was going to make the effort to do the challenge, I would stop drinking. Alcohol is a socially acceptable vice, but that doesn’t mean it is good for you. I thought if I am going to make the effort to be working out, and trying to eat well, it would be easy to undo all of that by drinking alcohol and eating snacks. I love Jack Daniel’s and Coke but know it isn’t a healthy habit. I think most of the stuff people tell themselves about drinking are unhelpful justifications for why they ‘need’ to, but I decided I would try and use the challenge time to give it a miss.

I was also going to try and address my portion control and love of butter, cream, cheese, carbohydrates throughout this six week challenge also. Something I have known I should be doing, but like drinking – I just wasn’t doing anything about it before now, so I decided to use the challenge as a kickstart for creating other cooking habits.

My other bad habit with food was skipping meals and not eating regularly. I would skip breakfast and lunch and then having lots of coffees and snacks, biscuits and big dinners too close to bedtime – more evidence of poor self-care, but I was keen to try and address these.

Changes I observed

As the challenge progressed, changes were not immediate or miraculous transformations. But here are some things that I noticed changing as I went along that I enjoyed and made notes about:

Change 1 = Sore muscles: not feeling connected to my body, feeling sore biceps or pecs or legs meant I at least knew I had them hidden in there, and I started to feel that I must have had a good session the day before if I could feel it in my non-existent muscles the next day.

Change 2 = Mindset: in the early classes, when it came to exercises I hated - which was all of them, I would stop before the end even if only by a few seconds and I would start a few seconds late. But as I progressed, if my positive mantra wasn’t working, or if I was hating a specific exercise - when it got to 1 or 2 seconds before the timer started, I would just start early. It forced me to change my thinking, to not let the bad thoughts win. It as a way to convince myself that I liked what I was doing or that even if I hated the exercise or class, I was going to own it.

Change 3 = Mindset II: looking forward to certain exercises or classes. This took a few weeks but with the idea of being addicted to exercising also taking shape, I started to like doing certain things. I can’t do chin ups, I’m a big fat guy with skinny arms - but I liked rowing and skiing machines and I liked being able to go to classes with my partner and daughter and hanging out together, talking about what we smashed or sucked at. It was slowly becoming fun.

Change 4 = Digestion: I have had issues with acid reflux for a long time, am lactose intolerant, and have had other issues with digestion and food over my lifetime. As I was eating healthier, not drinking alcohol and drinking more water - I definitely noticed that bloating and other challenges I had with digestion got a lot better.

Change 5 = Sleeping: my sleeping improved a lot. I was drinking less caffeine, doing more exercise, somedays I was more tired during the day, others I had more energy. Within 2 weeks I was going from 4-5 hours of sleep to 7 and I started to feel better in lots of different ways.

Change 6 = Anxiety and Stress: while initially going to the gym was causing extreme peaks in my stress and anxiety, as the challenge progressed they both decreased, I also noticed that my general daily stress and anxiety responses changed and decreased as the challenge progressed. I haven’t taken medication for anything for a long time now, and if you do or need to - keep doing it. But I found that for me, by improving the fundamentals of diet, exercise, sleep and water consumption - both my mental health and physical health improved. Everyone always told me that it would but I didn’t take the advice, and now I have some of my own evidence and experience, I am hoping that I can keep doing these things - and continue to see what the impact and results are.

Change 7 = Strength: one day I took my 40kg German Shepherd to a park. It then started pouring with rain, and by the time we both got home he was covered in mud and it was starting to snow. I thought about hosing him down outside in the freezing cold with the cold water hose - but felt that this would be cruel. The only other option I had was to pick up the muddy, messy and constantly moving dog and carry him up the stairs to the 2nd storey bathroom where there would be a warm shower waiting. I know there was no way I could have done this before doing the challenge. My dog at least had the decency to stay very still as I lifted him and carried him upstairs like a giant baby, he was probably as shocked as I was - but he very much preferred his warm shower and being able to finish drying in front of the fire. I wasn’t sure if I could do it, but was very pleased when I did that I could and that I had the thought that he didn’t feel as heavy. It was nice to be able to do that for him, it was in the second last week of the challenge, but stood out as a time I noticed that I was stronger in my mind and body than I was before the challenge.

Change 8 = My thoughts on the cost: I will also just quickly mention that yes, I had to buy some clothes and shoes to exercise in, get some towels to sweat on and a drink bottle. All of these things were things I needed to buy, they cost money, and the gym membership to go to classes cost money too.

But not moving costs money too, poor health costs money too, other addictions on offer cost money too. Exercise is definitely the cheapest of all of these in the short and long term – so if you are letting cost be your excuse, like I have for a long time, stop. I think deciding that the costs are worth it is one part of that excuse, but sadly, it might also be deciding that you are worth it is the other more important part.

I was sad last year when most of my clothes were starting to not fit me, and I was having to start buying larger sized clothes. I was the same size for most of my adult life, but eating and drinking more meant that my post COVID trips into the office were a harsh reminder that clothes I had worn for most of my life as a working adult didn’t fit me anymore. By the end of the challenge, I dared to try on some of my older clothes and they have started to fit me again. This was some positive reinforcement I needed and was grateful when I noticed that it was happening.

As someone who has paid for gym memberships on and off that I didn’t use in the last 15 years, the thoughts that you have tried it and it isn’t worth trying again, or because of past attempts and economic pressures that not spending money on yourself to avoid an avoidable cost is pretty easy to justify to yourself. My narrative was something like: “you can’t afford it, you already tried to do it and wasted the money by not going, and you need to wait until you are less busy to start, you don’t need more stress right now, you need to read the right book or health magazine first.” But I replaced these thoughts with my new thoughts: you just show up, you just start ticking off the box today, then do it again the next day, be grateful, eventually you’ll get addicted to the serotonin, dopamine and endorphin hits, the anxiety will subside and eventually the stress you’re associating with going to classes and your ever full to do list will slowly shift. Thankfully, it also helped that seeing some benefits from doing the challenge helped change how I was thinking about the costs.

Finishing the challenge

I was flying internationally during the last week of the challenge, one of the reasons I would have not done the challenge previously. But I went in before I left and did my weigh in and checks and then left town. I was home with my family in Australia for a week and woke early one morning to a post on social media - announcing that I had won the challenge. I had lost 6kg of fat, gained 0.5kg of muscle, and dropped 4.6% in my body fat percentage.

When I started going to F45, I thought I would probably stop going after the trial classes. When I first heard about the challenge, I was definitely not in the headspace for doing a challenge. When I entered the challenge, I hoped that I might get through it if I didn’t die or get injured first - but I wasn’t going to be able to exercise for the last week of the challenge, so I definitely didn’t think I was going to lose 5kg. But I did and I am excited - not because I won, but because I am learning and changing and trying to be a different person - and now have some evidence to encourage me to persist. I am still trying to tell myself that I can just show up, and tick the boxes everyday and that when I do that, I have less anxiety, I sleep better and I am starting to derive enjoyment from something that used to bring me none. I am improving at things that I am not naturally good at, and I can appreciate moving around and I am grateful that I can do exercise.

Final thoughts

I would actually like to continue with some of the changes I have made and new habits I have formed. In terms of BMI, I started the challenge in the top right of the morbidly obese box, and am now back down near the middle of the morbidly obese box - so I am still in the early stages of developing new habits, learning and improving. I’d like to get down into the just regular obese box, which doesn’t sound like much of a fitness goal. I’d like for my not being as fat to be normal, and for people not to point out every time they see me how I am looking good now compared to before, and how they were worried about me but were not saying, and are now relieved that I’m a bit less fat.

I’ve also recently been told a lot of stories about people who lost weight, only to put twice as much back on. How someone did something for a while, only to stop as soon as they had some hard times. It would be nice for people not to tell me they like my chin, now I’m going back to having only one of them, and all the other “encouragement” family and friends have been providing me recently regarding exercising and my appearance.

Away from the fitness fads and crazy influencer crowd - if you could be encouraged in any way by something in this blog, knowing I am someone with no agenda or motive, and no previous success at all in dieting or stopping drinking, let alone exercising, but that by going to F45 I was able to start. I wanted to sleep better, eat better and exercise regularly - and knew my sedentary lifestyle was killing me, but I didn’t have any of the tools or capacity to even think about what to do, and had no confidence I could.

Even writing this, I am worried I’ll drop dead at my first class after this and people will share this blog as a macabre funny anecdote about the guy who thought he was all that after a 6-week challenge and then died doing burpees to a dance version of a Nirvana song. If that does happen, know that I was very happy and grateful for everyone and everything in my life, and can regret many things, but not the time I spent finally doing some exercise in 2024.