If you lift or exercise on a regular basis, at some point you will have a day when you don’t feel like doing it. You may get home from work and you are exhausted. Or maybe you set your alarm for 5am and you feel how cold it is in your room and think, “I’ll just stay in bed today.”
While many positive, gung-ho people will say to just get going and cheerlead you on, most of us are not in that camp and would rather sit on the couch or stay in bed.
For me, I think you have 3 options when you don’t feel like exercising:
- Don’t exercise. It can actually be a good and healthy to not exercise, especially if you have done it a lot recently. The need for rest is incredibly important, not only for you to avoid burnout and fatigue, but also so that your muscles can recover and recuperate. In the crossfit world, you hear about the guys who lift 6 days a week and that isn’t healthy for everyone, maybe not anyone. You need to be careful that rest doesn’t become your normal routine or rhythm, but it can be a healthy thing to not exercise.
- Active rest. If you don’t need rest, but don’t have the energy for a full blown workout, have some soreness or an injury, do some active rest. Swim some laps, take a fast walk, do some jump rope, take a bike ride or a hike. Just get moving. Sometimes when you are worn out, you need fresh air or just need to move.
- Bite the bullet. In the end, you may be lazy and just making excuses so you need to bite the bullet, stop whining and just workout. Is it that simple? I’d say yes. One of the things I’ve learned in losing 130 pounds and keeping it off is that if working out is the next thing on your calendar, it gets done. While that sounds simplistic, we do what is on our calendar and to-do list. If working out is next and has a minute attached to it, it happens. If we say “we’ll workout after work” compared to “I’m working at 5:30 – 6:15.” Which one is more likely to happen? The one with time attached to it.
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