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Comment by unreal37 | Hacker News Reader

I'm probably twice Dan's age, but I am not sure about the "go to the gym, whenever you feel like, just do whatever, doesn't matter if you skip a week or two" advice.

I mean, that's traditionally thought of as the road to failure. 90% of people who do that, or 90% of things you try using that approach, will fail. You'll go to the gym 4 times, and then get too busy to go. And then never go.

I think you have to force yourself to go for the first month or two. Set a goal. Lift X pounds. Run X miles. And try every day to reach that.

At least until it becomes a habit, and you get to the point where you miss not going to the gym.

Good post though, and worth thinking about.

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Or worse than never going, you'll keep going, but you'll always just do whatever you feel like and never push yourself. Then years down the track you've made no progress, but poured countless hours into the habit.

It's probably not going to work if your strategy is to only do easy things, or only do really hard things. I suspect that the answer lies somewhere in the middle, as it often does, and as ever there is no way to summarise that as a simple and absolute rule, you just have to use your own judgement and self-knowledge to guide you.

People who seek these kind of easy answers are already in a quagmire. The most debilitating belief is the one that there's a perfect, general answer out there that you just have to find.

Unless you are unsatisfied right now, "progress" isn't really important. The most important part of exercising at least semi-regularly is to maintain your condition, and that get more important as you get older. Nobody has the TIME to do everything they might want, you have to prioritize. As Peter McWilliams put it:

"You can have anything you want: No dream is too big to achieve. But you can't have everything you want: We live in a finite world for a finite period of time, but with infinite imagination."

My startup is focused on building habits and we've found that doing one thing daily is extremely effective. In terms of forcing yourself, we decided to use peer pressure. The user chooses a few people that we can notify if the user doesn't do their daily step. These people then reply back with positive advice/feedback to the user if the user fails to do their daily step.

I created a custom goal called "Do 10 Pushups a Day" and it's been pretty good at making me actually do the pushups.

We launched recently and we'd love to hear your feedback. Link: http://www.goalhawk.com

Very interesting. Would you like to share how many users have you been able to sign up thus far?

Yeah, I am interested in this too. Any chance you can release some metrics?

I don't have those numbers off hand, but contact us with any specific questions you have and we'll see what we can pull up. team at goalhawk.com

It really is all about the small incremental steps, but sometimes, it just has to be enjoyable. I think that's really what he's getting at. If you find that going to the gym with friends is fun, then you'll never work out ever "work out again." I also agree with the forcing-yourself-to-go mentality too. I think that maybe better for some people.

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