by Jay Hiller, January 31, 2023
“Honestly, the bike is so good for you,” a family member’s PT told her. My family member was excited because she had been able to do some very light biking without pain for the first time in weeks. I immediately thought to myself, I should get on the bike. I haven’t done that for a long time. The reason I haven’t biked is because I’ve been choosing other forms of exercise.
I used to think I didn’t like to exercise because as a child I hated team sports. With super shaky eye-hand coordination and slow speed, I was frequently the one who failed to catch, throw or kick the ball at the right time, which made childhood PE classes yukky for me. Around age 16 I started running which doesn’t require you to make contact with flying projectiles. And then I moved on to a variety of other forms of exercise. Now there seems to be so many choices that I enjoy, I can’t possibly do all of them. That’s a good dilemma.
There are a lot of things to do that are free such as walking, jogging, bodyweight calisthenics, to name a few. There are entry points for just about anything. I taught myself to do pushups by practicing them during the commercials of a sit-com I liked. You also don’t have to invest a whole lot of time, especially at first. You don’t need a special place. I know two people who do stretching exercises in bed before getting up. I find this particularly interesting because they don’t know each other, couldn’t be more different from one another and one is in her eighties and the other one is in her forties.
So, if your situation is that you feel you should be exercising and you don’t like it, I’m sympathetic. I’m also challenging that story and your thinking. There’s gotta be something that you like, no matter what your circumstances.
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