My peak physical performance years ended when I became disabled at 20. I’ve since been strung up between knowing that exercise would be great for me and knowing that the world of exercise was not made for me. It doesn’t serve people with complex medical needs. It doesn’t offer safe harbour to people with eating disorders.
Don’t get me wrong. Gyms and content creators who promote inclusivity of all bodies and personal integrity are important. But the landscape of their existence is still defined by performance and improvement. I welcome the broad strokes, but not all of us live in bodies or societies that can live this mindset out to its idealized extent.
We know that regular exercise indisputably improves your quality of life. It improves sleep quality, boosts mood, and improves too many medical outcomes to easily list.
The pressure to exercise—and do it optimally—is immense, stemming from ever-shifting beauty standards and also ever-increasing healthcare costs. With cameras in hand, we live in a panopticon that promises release once we’ve become the optimally fit person. Add onto this the prodigious costs of healthcare and it’s little wonder so many people feel ready to take their health into their own hands.
Exercise has been made into far more than something you do for your health. It’s become a marketable moral imperative: Be the best, healthiest, most beautiful you possible. Failing or refusing that imperative becomes a moral failing. You start to believe that you’re not feeling the benefits or seeing the results because you’re ‘undisciplined’ or ‘lack dedication’. That the only real obstacle is your own ‘laziness’, and if you were just a little better or stronger, you’d be fit and hot and mentally awesome. I mean, exercise is good for you, so the harder you do it, the more benefits you’ll see… right?
Not quite.
Exercising too hard, for too long, or too often, entails risks that far outweigh the benefits. Pushing yourself too hard before you’re ready can lead to injuries that take weeks or months to heal (if at all). If you don’t let yourself recover between workouts, you risk overtraining syndrome, which adds symptoms like pain, anxiety, fatigue, and hypertension. Ironically, the very symptoms exercise was supposed to prevent.
There are also major obstacles to exercise that are not in our control. One factor is accessibility. You might not be able to afford a gym membership. It might not be safe to walk around the neighbourhood alone. You might not have friends close by that can exercise with you. The recommendation to just ‘take regular walks’ infuriates me because it’s one of the few things my disability can withstand, but South Africa is not a place to do it.
Complaints about these obstacles are met with instructions to stop whining and exercise at home: “if you wanted to change, you would.” But even this seemingly accessible form of exercise has challenges. Time is money, and we’re in one helluva global recession. Forget the gym membership. You might not have the time or energy for a workout after working, chores, cooking and eating, and looking after any resident dependents. Compound the difficulty if you have a disability that impedes mobility, stamina, or anything, really. Compound it again if you’re experiencing mental distress. Simply put, it’s good to acknowledge that people have different situations and some have it harder. It’s by design. To bring it back to beauty standards and wealth: Idealized fashion and beauty is intended to be unattainable. Not meeting these shifting and often contradictory goalposts isn’t a moral failing. Pretending it’s a moral feeling is how businesses sell us shit.
But we won’t give up the possibility of better health. I don’t think any of us want that. We want physiological goodness, the improved mood and sleep, and hell, even the higher sex drive. We also don’t need to be the best at exercise to reap these benefits.
Approaching exercise with realistic goals undercuts the physical risks of exercise (such as overtraining and injury) and lets you build exercise habits without being discouraged. But those aren’t the only benefits. According to some experts, keeping the majority of your workouts relatively easy minimises the body’s stress response and is an effective method of training. While frequency, volume/duration, and intensity of exercise are all important levers of fitness-building, high-intensity workouts can be the minority of your regimen. What matters is exercising more frequently. Even if all you can do is a bit of light exercise a couple times a week, you’ll see the benefits. They might even be sustainable.
Pick an activity. We all know about running and weight training. Walking is also valid, and pacing indoors to music also counts. Following a Youtube yoga video, skipping with a rope, or doing pushups and crunches during video game loading screens also works. Anything you do that moves your body and doesn’t make you hate it is good.
Then, sit down and look at your schedule realistically. You don’t need long workouts. Thirty minutes is a good starting point. Can’t squeeze it? Fifteen or ten a day is better than nothing. You’re aiming for consistency, not Herculean performance. Ask yourself how often you can put aside a little time to exercise without compromising on work, your sleep, or downtime. It might only be a couple times a week, but that’s still more enjoyable than doing a lot and hating yourself.
Once you have your plan, put it into motion. Starting gently is easier than ‘taking up’ an organized sport with its accompanying logistics. It’s more emotionally manageable than pouring money into gear, memberships, and trainers. If it’s still too hard, you can ease up with no misery about the sunk costs. If you hate your chosen exercise, you can switch anytime. Exercising without an attachment to measuring every performance metric and comparing it to others runs counter to how exercise is marketed. But it will help you start a habit or continue it because there’s less moral judgement. The people trying to sell you a smartwatch or a ‘must-have’ workout plan have no interest in you. They’re interested in your wallet. Only you can foster an interest in yourself.
The only ‘goal’ here is to get six weeks of consistency out of it. That should be enough to form a habit. There are no body or weight goals. No anatomical data to harvest. The movement is its own reward. The habit is a bonus. If that habit snowballs into one extra song’s length of working out every session, you’re well on track. That’s it. That’s the starting point for the ‘regular exercise’ we hear so much about. Give it enough time and another session, and that’s the one that’ll get you the sleep and heart health your doctor is cheering for.
And you won’t have to be anything close to ‘the best’ to achieve it.
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