Care Spot

One of the keys to success, if not the key, is the development of successful habits. I could go on about the importance of habits all day, but today I want to write about habits in relation to exercise. In particular, what I believe it the greatest habit to develop: exerciseevery day.
Firstly, everyone exercises for different reasons. Some people wish to lose weigh. Some people wish to increase their strength. Some people enjoy the social aspect of it. Some enjoy the competition. You get the idea. Despite these different reasons, everyone would agree that you feel great after exercise. The post-exercise surge in endorphins makes you feel on top of the world.
After years of being very active, I found recently I was not exercising as much as I would have liked. I would go through patches where I would exercise 5 days in a row, but that would be followed by 5 days of laziness. I had no idea of my exercise goals and I had no plan in place. Not surprisingly, a lot of the time I generally felt like crap.


So I took my first step forwards. I set of goal of feeling healthy and having a general sense of wellbeing. I would do this by exercising 5 times a week. I now had a goal and a plan, and indeed I started to see some positive results. But a funny thing happened. Because I knew that I would have two days off a week I often found that I could not motivate myself to exercise when I had initially planned to. This would be “one of those days off”. You can probably guess what happened. Despite planning to exercise 5 times a week, I actuallyexercised about 3-4 times. Sure I felt ok, but deep down I knew I was cheating myself. It also made a difference when I played basketball once a week and struggled to keep up.

What change did I make? You guessed it… I began to exercise every day. No more “this will be my day off”. Each day now I somehow manage to find at least 30 minutes to exercise. For example, I love an afterwork beer on Fridays. So I exercise in the morning before work on Friday.

For those who have struggled with irregular or non-existent training habits, I highly recommend you consider exercising every day. It may make all the difference.