Hi!!

MadisonLevine64

hello, i have been needing some help with self control, and keeping a schedule on working out, and not canceling cause i get "tired". if anyone has suggestions please let me know!!

AnnPT77

This may not apply to you, but a common thing I've seen here is people starting a punitively intense daily exercise schedule, maybe doing some exercise that's been touted as ideal - HIIT is a common one - but which they personally find miserable.

Any of those aspects - punitive, intense, daily, miserable - plus some related others: They tend to make the plan fail. And yes, one of the failure modes is "too tired".

My suggestion, especially for relative beginners, will be to find something you ideally actually find fun, or at minimum practical and tolerable. It needn't be intense, it needn't be in a gym, it can even be some form of movement that people might not think of as official exercise, like dancing, a martial art, playing active video or VR games, tossing a frisbee with the kids, whatever.

Do an amount of the fun thing(s) that is just a manageable challenge to current capabilities, maybe a very few minutes of "whew" right afterward, but an amount/intensity that leaves you feeling energized, not exhausted for the rest of your day(s).

Overdoing is counter-productive for weight loss or for fitness improvement.

For weight loss, the fatigue makes us rest more and do less during non-exercise time, effectively cancelling out some of the exercise calorie burn. For fitness improvement, overdoing short-changes recovery time, and recovery - the time between exercise sessions - is where the magic, the body rebuilding better, is happening. How much is too much is very individual, a balance of duration, intensity, frequency, type of exercise. As fitness level improves, we can do more, and we'll probably want to do more.

The "ideally fun" aspect is because any exercise we actually do is 100% more beneficial than any theoretically better exercise that we procrastinate, skip at the slightest excuse, or even give up altogether. If it's fun, we'll want to do it, right? "Tolerable and practical" is second best.

Also, give things a fair chance. Quite a few things might feel nearly impossible at first try, and if in a group setting we may feel as if everyone else is just more talented and finding it easy. Guess what, they were new once, and the nice people among them remember how that felt and will be supportive. (Anyone who's not supportive is an insecure jerk, and who wants to be friends with someone like that?!) Further, things that are easy at first may get boring fast, while things that are a little more difficult to learn are more engaging for longer.

The "manageable" part is what helps avoid over-doing. Increase exercise load gradually. A rough rule of thumb that some serious recreational athletes use is to increase total exercise load by no more than about 10% per week. That's a bit subjective, but still a reasonable guide. Pay attention to fatigue. New things will be more fatiguing than familiar ones, in addition to variables like duration, frequency and intensity of the familiar things. Wherever you are now, start there, and progress gradually. At first, include a lot of rest/recovery time: A couple workouts a week is a fine start. Even after 20+ years being regularly and fairly intensely active, I still do best taking one full rest day per week, with ultra-mild or no exercise activity. (P.S. I started being active in my late 40s after full-bore cancer treatment, quite physically depleted at the time, and class 1 obese, not as a blithe and bright-eyed teenager. Fitness improvement can happen at any age or stage.)

The "challenge" part is what creates fitness progress. Start with the manageable challenge and the fun. As you continue, whatever you're doing will get easy after a period of time. That's when to increase one of those variables like intensity, duration or frequency - or add in some new exercise type - to keep a bit of challenge in the picture.

Those would be my suggestions.