Exercising and getting into the habit of prioritizing your fitness is challenging – there are any number of infinite reasons that working out might take a back seat to the rest of your life – keeping up with kids, your career, feeling run down by the news cycle, body insecurities – take your pick.
It is difficult at first, to be sure, and takes work to stay motivated. There are many steps you can take to implement fitness into your every day, but the key to consistency, I have found, is cliché – and it is really the only thing that matters. You have to find something that you love.
If you haven’t yet found a workout that you love but you want to get in shape, the best thing you can do is ask the people in your life who have been dedicated to working out what types of exercise they enjoy. There are plenty who will try something in January as a part of a New Year’s resolution but are unable to stick with it, which is why finding people who have consistently stuck to their regiment is key. Nine times out of ten, you’ll find that those people are committed to a particular type of workout that has made it easy (or, at least, easier) for them to remain committed to exercise.
Because of the sheer volume of both at-home and in-studio workouts available, finding something you love is going to look different for everybody, and you can’t necessarily anticipate what that might be. Maybe you go to a yoga studio thinking that will be your passion but discover the sessions to be too slow; maybe you try a Zumba class in your living room because you love dancing but decide that it wasn’t challenging enough; or maybe you go completely out of your comfort zone and try your hand at a rock climbing gym and find that scaling tall walls and testing your upper body strength does it for you.
Paying attention to your temperament when exercising and listening to your body is also essential when finding a workout that you love; just because you think you’re supposed to be enjoying something doesn’t make it true, and if you force yourself through a series of exercises because you have convinced yourself that that is what you’re supposed to do, you are robbing yourself of a workout that could – and should – be a joyful experience from start to finish.
In the beginning, there was Jazzercise
I can remember when my mom first invited me to a Jazzercise class in 2012, and I went, begrudgingly, because I was certain I’d walk into a room full of women my mom’s age dancing to Paula Abdul and barely break a sweat. It wasn’t until after that first class with a popular, high-energy instructor named Teri that I found myself sweaty and giddy from the endorphins coursing through me. I was hooked, and from 2012 to 2020, I was a devoted Jazzerciser. In a lot of ways, Jazzercise is exactly what you think it is, but in many other ways, it’s also not what you expect it to be.
I fell in love with the diversity of music that blasted loudly and clearly through the speakers and the difficulty of the routines, and I always felt comfortable surrounded by a wide variety of ages, races, and body types. Classes were an hour long, with 30 minutes of cardio and 30 minutes of strength training, which was an ideal mix. (I would later learn that there should always be a balance of the two.) Going to a Jazzercise class never felt like a chore to me because I had made friends, improved my form, and found that, after a workout, I never felt better.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, however, and Jazzercise moved online, I canceled my membership – partially because I didn’t love working out at home, partially because I was in physical therapy at the time, and partially because I was ready for a change. While I loved Jazzercise for many years and the joy it brought to my life, I couldn’t motivate myself to engage with the program any longer.
From pliés to chest presses
For about a year, from 2020 to 2021, I didn’t belong to any gym, and the only physical activity I was getting was from walking my dog. When I finally joined a new gym here in metro Detroit in July of 2021, it was because two of my girlfriends had posted their content on Instagram, and I decided to give it a try.
The workouts were the hardest I had ever done – high-intensity interval training (HIIT)-focused and spanning 30-40 minutes, a HIIT workout is, according to Harvard’s School of Public Health:
…considered a complete workout that combines both aerobic and strength (resistance) training… incorporating several rounds that alternate between several minutes of high intensity movements to significantly increase the heart rate to at least 80% of one’s maximum heart rate, followed by short periods of lower intensity movements.
If you’re familiar with HIIT workouts, then you know just how hard they are. With thousands of variations of exercises that target your whole body, in one class you might do anywhere between 10 and 40 exercises in quick succession, including, but certainly not limited to, pushups, pullups, BOSU ball burpees, box jumps, chest presses, side planks, battle ropes, and so on and so forth, forever in perpetuity, with an infinite amount of tried-and-true exercises in addition to interesting, new exercises that are consistently deployed into the HIIT arsenal.
The classes I attended in the beginning of my new gym journey left me pouring in sweat, consistently out of breath, sometimes unable to finish a class, and always sore. Even though I had considered myself to be pretty in shape at the time, I was humbled at the end of each 40-minute session, but I stuck with it because I fell in love with the exercises in the same way I had fallen in love with Jazzercise classes.
HIIT workouts changed me in ways that Jazzercise hadn’t; I’m not sure if this was because they were (objectively) more challenging classes or because I was going more consistently, but watching my body respond to – and become defined by – the pushes, pulls, jumps, lifts, dips, and presses became a bonus to the habit I was forming. It didn’t hurt that I had found a community of women at that particular gym whom I grew close with and that we had a coach who helped us through every exercise, modifying when he knew we needed it.
Wake up, brush your teeth
Something I have found that I hadn’t expected with my commitment to HIIT workouts is having friends, family, and loved ones ask me how I remain committed to exercise, and I’ve always said (at least I think I have) the same thing: Once you make it a habit, it’s like brushing your teeth in the morning, and this is true – at least for me. Getting up before work to go to the gym has become second nature, and it’s no longer something I think much about. That said, I wouldn’t find myself in the position that I do if I hadn’t stumbled upon a workout that I love because the exercises consistently change, challenging me physically and mentally.
If you’re on the hunt for a workout that you can fall in love with, I promise you it’s out there. As long as you don’t force yourself to enjoy something that you actually don’t, which may cause you to quit in the short term, a healthier and more joyful future is within your reach.
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