Exercise isn’t something that I felt like I had to pursue as a child and teenager, but I haven’t managed to find an exercise rhythm that I’ve been able to maintain in adulthood. As a teenager, I took somewhere from around five to seven hours a week of dance classes in addition to P.E., musicals, walking to hang out with friends, and other activities like that. When I graduated high school, I lost that rhythm of weekly dance classes that didn’t feel like exercise to me, but definitely kept me active.

My first two years post high school, I lived at home and went to a junior college – I had very little activity or exercise in my life. I would occasionally go to the gym, but there was never any real rhythm to it. Sometimes, I went and used some exercise machines. Sometimes, I took walks. Sometimes, I worked out in my room. I never had a real practice or routine to it. Then, I moved on campus to a state school and suddenly found myself walking 10,000 plus steps everyday with no intention towards doing so. I lived on the third floor and we didn’t trust the elevator, so I went up flights of stairs in my dorms and classroom buildings. Instead of gaining weight moving away from home for the first time, I lost most of the weight I had gained the prior two years. My daily life made activity easy and thoughtless. Everyone on campus walked. We made it work. I even had job that required walking and standing for most of the shifts. There was an adjustment period, but 10,000 steps became easy and normal. I would try gym classes, but never gained any real habits around gym classes or exercise. Although, I did finally learn that I liked yoga.

Then, I graduated and started working a series of office jobs. I started gaining more weight and activities that were easy became harder. I was losing fitness because I still didn’t have any habits around it. I would try classes or gyms here or there at random times. Since of walking over 10,000 steps each day, I would be lucky to hit 2,500. I started considering 5,000 steps in a day a good achievement. When I graduated college, I was around 115 lbs. Five years later, I average 142 lbs. Weight isn’t necessarily a good measurement of fitness, but I know that I’m not gaining muscle. It’s fat, it’s a loss of fitness, it’s things that use to be easy becoming harder because my lifestyle changed and I didn’t adjust my activity routines to make up for it.

When I started recognizing the problem of needing to incorporate more intentional exercise into my life, I started trying a variety of methods to make that happen. For a long time, we weren’t in a place to afford much as far as gym memberships and such went, but we lived in a college town. There were free yoga classes I could take, and I did that relatively consistently when it was offered. My workplace participated in a citywide walking challenge which I signed up for, but the competition part show proved incredibly exhausting. There were people regularly logging upwards of 20,000 steps per day which is very difficult to achieve in an office setting. One month, I decided to challenge myself to fill all the rings on my apple watch every day for a month. 12 hours meeting the 1-2 min standing goal, some amount of calories for the move goal, and so many (15? 20?) minutes of exercise per day. I chose February, as the shortest month, for my month to pursue the goal and achieved it – it also provided to be very exhausting to me and I quickly let my streak die afterwards. I did find a exercise YouTuber I liked, MadFit, particularly her dance workout videos. I still like to pull up her videos sometimes for a quick, fun workout. I also learned that my health insurance at the time offered access to the Pelton classes, which I really enjoyed using.

YouTube is a great resource, health insurance can offer great benefits like Pelton classes, and challenges can be very motiving in the short term – but I still hadn’t found anything that kept my consistent in pursuing regaining my fitness. Until, and maybe this is premature to say, I got a small home treadmill. We got the treadmill on October for just $260 with taxes off of Amazon, and I really wasn’t sure how much I would use it, but I thought the option would be good to have. In December, I started a habit tracker goal of just ten minutes per day on the treadmill – whenever speed, whenever distance – just ten minutes. Just ten minutes is such an easy goal to hit. I can do it before work, but a lot of times I’ll do it in the evening – sometimes even at 9 or 10 pm because I don’t want to lose my streak. I’ve only skipped two days since I started the habit tracker. Even before that, I found that having the treadmill there in my living room was really encouraging to get me to stand up and just walk for a little bit each day. I haven’t lost any weight, but the weight gain plateaued when it had been swinging up (which was the motivation for purchasing the treadmill).

For me, the treadmill in my living room has really worked at getting me to finally have an exercise routine of some sort instead of the slapdash way I was going about it. A real barrier to exercise for me was really getting dressed and putting on real shoes. I can do that for my living room treadmill, but I don’t have to. PJs, business casual, actually athletic wear – no one except me cares in my living room. Barefoot, slip-ons, or tennis shoes – the only ones to complain are my feet. I don’t have to pick out a video, turn on the TV, or anything except turn on the treadmill and then I’m ready to work out. Breaking down the barriers of having to get dressed and leave the house or make a decision about how I’m exercising has really made an incredible difference in how often and how much I work out now.

Do you have barriers when it comes to exercise? Are they mental like mine? Is it too much to make a choice about how to exercise, or when? Is getting “ready” to work out too much of a process? If your house isn’t a good place to exercise, is there a financial barrier like I use to have too? Is figuring out how to exercise just too much of a burden?

I don’t have answers for how you should overcome those barriers, but I encourage you to keep exploring what your barriers to exercise are and how you can get around them. I love classes, but dislike wandering around a gym and using machines. If I can do all my exercise using body weight only, that’s my ideal. Financial barriers are real, and they limit your options – some gyms like Planet Fitness are cheap but that’s not helpful if you don’t know how to use the machines. You may not live in an area with free classes or much walkability. You may have time barriers – it can be very limiting if you only have 20-30 minutes to spare for exercise. Your home may not be suited to exercise in – I lived in a poorly designed 750 sg ft house and there really wasn’t much space to work out in there – or your family/housemates may make it difficult to work out at home. My human housemates haven’t been much trouble in that regard, but my cats love to lay in the middle of my yoga mat while I’m in downward dog.

Explore your options though – there’s no right way to incorporate exercise into your life. Gyms, online classes and videos, memberships with virtual gyms like Pelton, at home machines, walking around town, taking the stairs and more. There’s a right way for you, I promise. You don’t have to follow anyone else’s model. Use others as inspiration, but don’t worry about perfectly reproducing their routines.

I’d love to hear about your fitness journeys and how you’ve incorporated exercise and fitness into your lives as adults – everyone has a unique story and I’m sure I could learn something about incorporating more fitness into my life.