The Real Exercise Struggle

I’m going to tell you about my struggle with exercise, and hopefully some of you can relate just so I can feel better about my pathetic efforts.

Around July 2021! We’re still in the thick of working from home in Lagos, and I’m loving it. Let me tell you, the best thing in my entire apartment had always been my bed, and work from home made me love it even more! I slept in it, ate on it, and worked from it. When inevitably, I started to look like it too, I realised I needed some sort of movement and activity in my life.

I explored several options.

How about a gym subscription? Nope, quickly discounted - I would I have to spend money on work out wear and I’m allergic to spending money. Also, I’d have to drive to the gym - defeats my whole work from home enjoyment where I didn’t have to go anywhere.

How about a quick walk in the evenings? But what if I exhaust myself so much that I’d have to crawl home? What if a potential serial killer neighbour sees me, maps my routine, and successfully kidnaps me - what would I do then? Nope, whatever I chose had to be done 100% from home, with 0% prep time, and away from any neighbouring eyes.

So I did what any self-respecting person in the Strategy Consulting profession would do - I went on Google and typed in the search box: ‘easy home exercises for beginners’.

A thousand and one options popped out, and when I clicked on the first result, it took me to YouTube with a thousand more video results. I spent all evening excitedly bookmarking videos like ‘dance exercise for beginners’, ‘aerobics for beginners’, ‘easy exercises with no equipment for beginners’. Honestly, I felt extremely productive, even though just my fingers got any exercise that day. But I was optimistic and promised myself that I’d start tomorrow.

Fast forward a week and I suddenly recalled my 50 or so bookmarked beginner aerobic videos. I must have had a great day at work that Friday cause I decided to take one ‘30 minute easy dance exercise for beginners’. It was an Indian crew, led by a beautiful, strong, flat ab’ed woman who encouraged me to ‘break free’ while dancing to the music.

We started off. I huffed and puffed my way past elbow jabs, hip thrusts, knees lifts, and God knows what else. Five minutes in and I was literally done.

‘Come on guys!’

Shouted my perfect looking instructor,

‘Get ready to break free! We’re almost done with the warm up!’

Ugh? Warm up? No no no. No amount of encouragement could get me off the floor I suddenly collapsed onto.

That’s were I left my exercise goals.

Anyway, fast forward to December 2021, and I was ready to give exercise another try because all those Instagram videos had been encouraging me to ‘live my best life’.

This time though, I decided to be smarter about my effort. So, I love to tick things off my task list. Have you done that recently? Doesn’t it make you feel like you’re going out into the world and productively getting what you want one tick mark at a time? Well, since that worked so well for me at work, I decided to put daily exercise on my task list too. If it was on the list, I had to do it. And if I saw it undone at night, I could guilt myself into doing what it took to tick that exercise box.

But I had to be smarter about it.

That word ‘exercise’ seems like way too much work, and not really any fun for someone as lazy as me. What I actually needed immediately was really activity. I needed to get my heart stronger, build up stamina, and just stop being a bed potato. I needed to move. So in my task list, I changed it from ‘exercise’ to ‘movement’. I started feeling like daily movement was way closer to my grasp.

One final thing. I couldn’t just count movement from my bed to the fridge and back as my daily movement, I had to be intentional. So I put in a time limit. I decided to start with an abysmal 5 minutes for the first couple of months. But I did it! So I decided to ramp up 5 minutes each month! And if it was lower intensity than aerobics, I’d do more minutes. But 5 minutes of intense workout would be counted as a win.

Doing these three little things has helped me struggle less, though struggle I still do. The draw of the bed potato life may be strong, but perhaps the power of consistency through these little acts might be my life boat.