Truly, truly do hate to exercise. Started when I was but a tadpole, the hating to exercise bit, and don't think I have ever changed my mind. There have been brief portions of my life when I could actually say I was sort of in a good shape and did regular things that were exercise related or actual exercise, e.g. volleyball for awhile, fencing for awhile, bicycling, walking, horseback riding, but that's about it. Short periods of intense craziness and then back to a sedentary lifestyle and creaking in the knees and aches and pains doing just about anything.
BUT I know I should exercise and I have plans to do it regularly and I try hard to incorporate it into my life and have dropped doing other things so that my exercise plans are not shunted to the side and buried like they usually are. Oh, and the fact that my age and arthritis were making daily life much harder than it should have been so I have started exercising.
My daughter is a physically fit person and exercises almost every day. I don't know how she became such an athlete other than I did put her in gymnastics as a child and she stayed with it into high school and then went into track and field. Now she does it because it makes her feel better and without doing any exercise, she claims her whole day is crappy. wow. I have never, ever felt like that. Wow again. Never have I felt so much better after exercise that I am just so happy to have done it and so ready to do it again the next day! Usually I felt like crap when I am exercising and am just really, really glad to be done. Then the next day comes and I have to go through a whole new ramp up of cheer-leading myself into doing it again! Where are my endorphins? Why don't I have any? I have jokingly told my daughter that once or twice I've gotten maybe 1/2 or 1 (at the most) endorphins from the exercise but to find some everyday? Where is that "wall" I hear athletes talk about that they push past to get such wondrous feelings from the work out? For me, it's a brick wall and I just run smack into it. There is no pushing past it for a better feeling. There is just "OMG - I ran into a brick wall!"
Every once in awhile I do stupid things because it is expected of everyone - this is the "join the gym and never go". Yep, been there, done that. Especially when my daughter is not around. She is able to let the guilt flow up to me and "guilts" me into going to the gym with her. When she's not here, forget it.
I've done other things to try and get exercise into my life. When we were living in Canada, we had a young man come to the house as our personal trainer. He was quite good in helping us once a week work out and I enjoyed those sessions. We had a great place set up in the basement for exercise in that we had mats, a hanging punching bag, a treadmill, and a chin up stand plus TRX ropes. He didn't have a whole lot of experience but he was enthusiastic and able to get us going. still don't feel like I got many endorphins and finding my core muscles seems rather elusive.
Leaving that location and moving on left me with no place to exercise on a regular basis and no motivation to do it on my own so I sunk back into my lethargy. Then we move to England and I really have to do something physical or sink into being a couch potato blob so my daughter and I join a gym again. As she is not here all the time, I do the guilt workouts when she's here and pretty much skip it when she's gone. I get a trainer but he's pretty much useless and doesn't really know what he is doing as far as adapting a program to a person and their body type and such so most of my time with him is spent in pain and hating every minute of it. No endorphins, no core muscles. So I quit going to the gym again.
Once again, my daughter comes to my rescue and finds me a better trainer, a superb trainer, and an experienced one. Wow, he's good. We start working out together at the gym but then the gym closes so he starts coming to the house. He says that he has all these exercises and things to do just floating around in the ether about him and he pulls them out of the air as needed depending on how I am feeling and working out that particular day. It is amazing that I actually enjoy working out with him and feel, for the first time, that maybe there are some endorphins there - at least some of the time. Still, some days it's just all crap and garbage to do anything but I am persisting and trying and possibly I might have seen a glimpse of some core muscles a couple of weeks ago.
I still hate to go to the gym. Part of it is because we belong to a really crappy gym. We joined a gym where my hubby could swim during his lunch hour. The deal was I would go and swim with him. As he gets very little exercise in his job and spends hours in meetings and in front of the computer, I thought this would be good for all of us. Plus I am not a very good swimmer but I love to scuba dive so thought I could get better at swimming going to the pool with him (a whole different story and kettle of worms there!) But I hate the gym where we go. It is a crappy, crappy gym and caters to families so some days there are young boys in the dressing room at a much more advanced age that I would have ever let my son into a women's dressing room - had I ever had a son. Other days there are just screaming girls in there with mothers paying little, if any, attention to them. But even without the kids, it's still a crappy gym and I hate going and I do come up with all manner of excuses not to go. The only reason we go there is so my hubby can walk over on his lunch hour. Today I was actually there when they had a fire drill! Of course I used this as a reason to quit and go home and do my errands. But my daughter returns to visit us later this week and that means she will guilt me into going most days again. Maybe I'll find an endorphin or two or maybe a core muscle or two. They must be there somewhere.
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