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Comment by david-given | Hacker News Reader

Competition sports I find a complete turnoff --- as soon as I find myself facing off against anyone else I instantly lose interest. (It comes from very bad experiences of mandatory exercise at school which basically taught me that I always lose.) I've tried weight training --- spent six weeks doing ~45 a day when my local gym had a special offer. That was even more ghastly; I'd find myself watching the clock desperately wanting it to be over.

The point I'm making is that exercise is not fun for me, and while I appreciate the effort, attempts to persuade me otherwise are doomed to failure. (The endless, banal music the gym played didn't help.) What was worse was that there was no objective way to measure progress so I didn't even know if it was doing anything.

(That said, I do enjoy hill walking (== hiking), but that's even more of a time sink and not something I can do on a daily basis. It's also strictly low-output aerobic.)

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> What was worse was that there was no objective way to measure progress so I didn't even know if it was doing anything.

I agree that not being able to measure progress is horribly demotivating. But I find the opposite, that exercise is one of the few areas in my life where I can objectively measure progress. For example:

  Body weight
  Resting heart rate
  5k run time
  Longest distance run without stopping
  Max weight / number of repetitions / duration for strength exercises

These are all objective measurements which can be tracked over long periods of time and directly correlate with the amount and quality of training that one does. I have found that this is the best long-term way to motivate myself.

Well, only the first two are objective --- the others are all way too subjective, as they depend horribly on how motivated I am. Even the objective measures are hugely variable, so in order to get any actual data, I have to measure trends over months, rather than weeks.

Being told that I need six months' work before anything measurable happens is not really something I find motivating!

One of the things you get to track improvement on with exercise is the ability to motivate yourself. It is part of you improving your physical and mental health, not unwanted noise.

For me when I started exercising seriously I started noticing I was consistently beating my personal bests [1] after about 2 weeks. It doesn't take 6 months. I even started feeling great from the cardio on Day 1.

[1] Running times over a set distance, and amount of pushups/pullups/situps in a row. If I actually recovered properly it would probably take even less time to beat the initial records.

I also didn't have great experience of team competition as a kid. I've since learnt that kids can be introduced to sport far more inclusively and positively, and now enjoy coaching my kids sports teams. But my own activities remain largely solo, uncompetitive and somewhat introspective - there are plenty of very physical activities that fit this bill, and you don't have to go anywhere near a gymn (which I personally don't like at all). Think surfing, skating, climbing, cycling, hiking, kayaking... You can get a great workout without "working out".

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