Step 1: I don’t want to exercise

If you are at this stage, you may be wondering what could possibly be done to get you to budge beyond it. Other people might be pressuring you, but IT’S UP TO YOU–you’re the one who has to tie your shoes and go out for a walk. And you don’t even want to make the effort to think about it. Two things can offer a push: Acquiring knowledge and whining.

Acquiring knowledge involves being open to facts and opinions concerning your state of fitness (or lack of it) and both the benefits of exercise and the health risks of not exercising. The source of the information can be external–others observing that you don’t exercise, loved ones confronting you about it, family members giving you newspaper or magazine articles about exercise. Or it can be internal–watching TV or movies about sports, reading about exercise, learning about the psychology of why people don’t exercise

In some cases, simply soaking up the incoming information can at least make you more likely to start thinking seriously about exercise, even if you have no intention of doing anything about it. It could be, however, that despite the good efforts of your friends and relatives, the fact still remains that you don’t want to exercise. And right now you simply may not be interested in gathering information.

So maybe you need to try venting and whining. This involves giving vent to the problem. You may complain about what happened the last time you tried to exercise (“Oh, that cramp I got! I was sore for days!”) or all the things that kept you from working out (“I wanted to, but Janey had a dentist’s appointment”).

All this talking and complaining about the problem helps. It at least gets you thinking about exercising. It gets the wheels turning so that getting fit becomes a problem to be solved. That is, if you CHOOSE to look at it that way.

Here’s my rule for complainers: You have exactly TWO MINUTES to vent and complain. Ready? Go… (Tick, tock, tick, tock…) Okay, done. NOW GO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

It may seem that nothing is happening in the I Don’t Want to Exercise stage, but the more you acquire knowledge and vent and whine, the more their effects can accumulate.