Motivate Yourself Past Exercise Blocks

It all seemed to be going so well: you got up an hour early to go for a run or get to an exercise class before your workday started. Or maybe you brought a stuffed gym bag to your job so you could hit the fitness center at day's end.

These traditional plans for getting the physical activity we all need can work very well, month in and month out, for some people. For the rest of us, life can mess up our exercise routines, big-time. An injury, illness, children's schedules, demands at work, elders' needs, boredom, fatigue, a tightened budget—all can contribute to blocking our efforts to become, and remain, physically active.

Once that exercise block develops, finding the motivation to get past it is tough.

Yet, what if the problem isn't finding a bigger carrot (or stick)—what many people mistakenly call "motivation"—to force you back into exercising? What if the problem begins with how we think about the role of physical activity in our lives?

"Exercise has been a commodity instead of a process," says Michelle Segar, PhD, MPH, a psychologist who's conducted studies on motivation and physical activity at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and founder of www.essentialsteps.net, a philosophy of exercise for midlife women. The best plan, she says, begins with "deconstructing what exercise means … and then repackaging and re-creating it to what you, the individual, needs."

When you do that, Dr. Segar adds, you make physical activity fit your personality and life context. "It's very freeing," she says.

It also helps explain why her research shows that many women's main motivation for exercising—wanting to lose weight or change body shape—is a poor one. Her study found that women who cited those reasons as their motivation exercised about 40 percent less than women who were physically active to increase their sense of well-being or reduce stress or because they enjoyed the activity.

Facing your block

An important part of getting unblocked about exercise involves getting in touch with why you want to be physically active in the first place.

"If your reason is a 'should,' that's a recipe for not exercising," says Dr. Segar. To become more active or unblocked, "exercise has to be a nurturing activity and be about taking care of yourself…which often isn't going to the gym to get 40 minutes on the stair machine."

You may be thinking, "Yes, but my exercise block can't go away because of _____ (fill in the blank)." Fair enough. There are some events that pose significant challenges to motivation, such as illness, a loved one's death or a job or relationship loss.