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The Reasons It’s Hard to Exercise
Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.
— ARTHUR ASHE
NEW YEAR! NEW YOU! Your motivation is high and your effort is strong.
In the beginning, exercising is easy.
But then . . . it’s not.
Three times a week becomes two and then one.
Suddenly, you’re too busy to exercise and too tired to move; at least, that’s what the brain wants you to believe. Why? Because it prefers the status quo, and exercise is attempting to change that.
The truth is you don’t have to accept the status quo.
You can change your brain by changing your mind.
It’s mind over matter.
And it’s time to set your mind right so you can get moving and let the healing begin.
In this chapter, you will learn the reasons it’s hard to exercise and what you can do to overcome the brain’s built-in barriers that may be holding you back.
WHY IT’S HARD TO EXERCISE
It was the first day of the new year, and I sat in our home office staring blankly at the computer screen. I had a new fitness goal (to complete a triathlon) but no idea where to start. I needed an action plan. Come to think of it, I needed one for my life too. I opened a browser, and my eyes locked on the search engine. I could feel a quiet resistance building in my body as if it were protesting, “There’s no need to change.” It was my biological inertia talking, and the discord between my mind and my body warned me that the journey ahead would not be easy.
We all know that the first few steps on any new fitness journey can be difficult. But did you know that the brain is partly to blame? Instead of encouraging us to change, it wants us to stay the same.
Amidst a constantly changing world, the brain strives to keep the body centered around an ideal state — a homeostatic happy place. This is your body’s comfort zone. Unfortunately, our homeostatic happy place is outdated. Its default settings were established more than a million years ago. Sure, some things are still the same. Body temperature is still ideal at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, and the brain and body work together to achieve homeostasis and maintain that temperature. When we get too cold, we shiver, and when we get too hot, we sweat. But the homeostatic control of our energy balance is way off. This is especially true when it comes to our hunger dial, which was set to meet the energy demands of a prehistoric time when starvation was a real threat. The hypothalamus, one of our most primitive brain regions, controls the hunger dial and dials it up when we move more. This helps prevent starvation, but it also makes it harder for us to lose weight by only exercising.
Although that may sound all fine and good, there is a catch: The lowest setting for our hunger dial is not low but moderate.1 What does that mean? It means that the brain assumes we are at least moderately active. But most of us are not, and because of this, we end up eating more than we move. This is why it’s so difficult to maintain our weight. Our modern sedentary lifestyle has effectively broken the brain’s energy balance, and for the first time in human history, more people are overweight than underweight.
The good news is that you can restore your brain’s energy balance by moving more.
The bad news is that it’s harder than it sounds, especially when the mere thought of exercising makes the brain cringe. Why does the brain hate exercising so much? Here are the top two reasons and what you can do to overcome them.
Reason 1: The Brain Makes Us Lazy
The number one reason the mere thought of exercising makes the brain cringe is because the brain is lazy. Well, to be fair, it’s not lazy per se but conservative.
The brain views all voluntary exercise as an extravagant expense and only wants you to move if your life depends on it. To be clear, your life does depend on it; however, unlike our prehistoric predecessors who needed to move to survive, our inactivity may take decades to destroy us. Your lazy brain would rather you save your energy for later, when you really need it. But let’s be honest, there may never be a time in modern-day life when you actually need to move to survive. And that changes everything.
Despite the brain’s amazingness, parts of the brain are mere relics of our evolutionary past. Regions like the hypothalamus and its hunger dial were heroes back in the day when food was scarce and we needed to expend tremendous energy to hunt and gather to survive. Just consider the amount of energy expended during a persistent hunt. Anthropologists believe that early humans used this form of hunting to capture their prey by outrunning it.2 The hunt would begin at the hottest time of the day and would last for hours. This gave us humans an advantage; with less hair, more sweat glands, and greater efficiency of our bipedal movement, we could endure the heat stress longer than most animals.
After hours of pursuit, the animal would eventually collapse from sheer exhaustion, allowing prehistoric hunters like John to capture his prey without a fight. But the marathon chase left John exhausted too. It would take him days to rest and recover before his body would be ready to hunt again.
When not hunting, it was absolutely imperative that John minimize any unnecessary movement to ensure a speedy recovery. John had no problem with this. In fact, he had a reputation for being the “laziest while idle.” Although John took tremendous flak for his behavior (especially from the women of his tribe), in the end, everyone benefited from his laziness. You see, John’s legs were always well rested for the hunt, making it easier for him to outrun his tribe’s next meal.
Ultimately, John’s laziness saved his life. It also helped him live long enough to pass on his energy-wise genes to the next generation. Although Darwin might have been confused: “Survival of the fittest . . . and laziest”? It was true. And now all of John’s descendants (the John Jr.’s of the world) are blessed with John’s energy-wise genes.
Fortunately, John Jr. no longer needs to hunt to survive. Instead, he spends most of his time stuck in lazy mode, and his aptitude for it is remarkable. However, we had best not judge, for we all have some of John’s old energy-wise genes in us.
In fact, the laziest parts of our brain are so good at conserving energy that they optimize every step we take. On the fly, our brain sets our stride to be most efficient for the terrain. This is true even for new movements that we’ve never experienced before, as demonstrated by a study that John Jr. participated in. The researchers outfitted John Jr. with a robotic exoskeleton, which he wore like a brace around his knee, that altered his stride in an unfamiliar way.3 Within minutes, his lazy brain had already figured out the most efficient way to move to expend the least amount of energy possible. Fascinating, right?
But it can also be very frustrating, especially when you are trying to start a new exercise program. If the mere thought of expendi...
