WORKING OUT AT HOME

You can do it, but it takes patience

The idea of doing physical activity at home as opposed to elsewhere - the gym, the roads, a club - can be quite appealing on a practical level. It negates the need to travel or share equipment, as well as offering benefits such as privacy and opportunities for integrating physical activity seamlessly into your day. If you’re someone who is deterred from being active by things like a busy schedule or self-consciousness, shifting to a home-based activity, even if just to start with, can be a great way of developing more consistency with your physical activity habits.

However, a lot of people find the idea of exercising at home quite challenging. The most common explanation is “I can’t motivate myself to do it at home, I just can’t get in the right headspace.” Often this is exacerbated by the lack of external instruction or accountability that comes with exercising at home, not to mention the more general social isolation.

The good news is that is is possible to get motivated to do your physical activity at home if it makes sense for you. However there is a reality to it that many don’t realise, which is that making that change takes a lot more patience and persistence than you might realise or like. Below I will discuss why it is so challenging to make this shift, why you can still do so nonetheless, and what it requires.

The power of the environment

The most obvious factor maintaining this challenge is the nature of the environment, and there are a few key aspects to this that I’ll illustrate with the example of gyms. Gyms (be that the main gym floor or a class) are literally set up for what you are trying to do. They have the space and equipment you need, which makes it straightforward to get in and get your workout done, but they also have various other objects and pieces of décor in them that are associated in most people’s minds with physical activity.

At a technical level, these objects then serve as cues that our brains pick up on at an implicit level, and if they are associated with you going ahead and doing a workout then they are likely to heighten the “incentive salience” of physical activity, i.e. make you more likely to feel drawn to it. This effect is magnified if you have plenty of experiences of successful or enjoyable workouts there - the more this is the case, the more you’ll feel pulled towards going as opposed to feeling as if you have to force yourself to get there.

As a silly but not unrelated example, our old family tortoise Maisie figured out she could push this dumbbell along quite easily, and after that she would seek it out and push it all around the house, because she knew she could!

Although it isn’t quite as simple as that. Specifically, the effects such “cues” have on us (e.g. a motivational poster on the wall) are determined by the sum of the net valence (positive, neutral or negative) of our past experiences in the presence of those cues, PLUS the meaning we assign to them in the present depending on our current mental state, goals and other congruent or competing cues in the environment… that might sound like a bunch of technical jargon, because it is, but this is an example of one of the many rabbit holes I could go down in a post that I have to refrain from to avoid the post becoming about literally everything in psychology. So if you want to know more I will be explaining it in my next post which should be up within the week - I will link it here.

But back to the gym environment - gyms are also full of others doing what you are doing, in addition to personal trainers who promote physical activity. You need not interact with, know or even recognise any of these people to be affected very subtly by what is an implicit shared experience: everyone in one place, working (most of the time!) under the same code of conduct towards similar goals. Even if you are doing so totally individually, there is still something about this experience that resonates at a fundamental sociobiological level.

Contrast this environment with your living room or garage, in which you perform a huge variety of daily tasks that have little to do with exercise and share little in terms of required mindset or accompanying emotions. So “home” just doesn’t feel like it’s meant for or conducive with exercise, even if you have the space and equipment. As a result, you struggle to get yourself in the “headspace” where you actually want or feel bothered to initiate a physical activity. Equally, without external contingencies (i.e. aspects of the external environment that make engaging in further exercise an obvious choice, such as having already run a mile from home or driven to the gym) or instruction, you are now the sole driver of your efforts, which is a different psychological context.

So not only is the environment perceived as incongruent at home, but it also demands that we do something different psychologically to deal with this different context. You may be able to perform the same physical workout, but as it stands it feels very different and it requires a different quality of focus than you might typically have in the gym. This means we’re in practice having to create a new habit.

How to make the transition

Let’s start with the low-hanging fruit - make sure you have adequate space and the necessary equipment available and easy to access. It might sound simple, but if the workout feels touch and go off the bat, all it can take is a few extra preparatory steps to deter you. As I described in a previous post, keeping my Muay Thai bag in the garage, when I could only use it outside, was enough to deter me from using it for a while. When trying to forge a new habit, you want to reduce any unnecessary effort and resistance because all of this adds to perceived effort, ultimately tipping the scales towards abstaining.

Secondly, you're going to have to let your brain know that this is now the space you're going to be exercising in. One practical way of doing this is to consider what physical tweaks you can make to the space you’ll be using that can serve as cues relating to physical activity - even better if they are cues that trigger some kind of positive emotion (e.g. inspiration, curiosity, pride).

If it’s your garage and it doesn’t matter so much if it is littered with random exercise-related stuff, perhaps you could hang a picture on the wall that reminds you of positive exercise experiences, or a memento from a time you achieved something you’re proud of with physical activity (e.g. a medal from a local 10k, the first gym t-shirt you ever bought).

If it’s going to be your living room and you’re a little more particular about the décor, you could have a few related items to bring in there each time you attempt to workout to create a temporary environment. To provide a practical example, something I do when I strength-train at home is put a few drops of a particular essential oil onto a sweatband and wear it. The essential oil is from a company called Oil Is Well who were exhibiting at a stand next to mine at the National Running Show last year. It was fantastic to get constant wafts of peppermint and rosemary all day, but more pertinent to this post is the fact that those scents became associated with feelings of excitement and adventure - it was a leap of faith to exhibit there and I was proud I had the courage to do it. Therefore, in bringing that scent into my strength workouts, I am reminding myself of those experiences - not explicitly related to strength-training, but certainly states of mind that create a helpful headspace for it.

However, these cues gain a lot more power through having positive experiences of the desired activity in their presence - i.e., completing a workout in that space repeatedly. Clearly that is a challenge if you're struggling to initiate the workout at all. So the most fail-safe thing to do is negotiate with yourself and ask “what exactly am I prepared to do here?” The biggest mistake people make here is to discount any type of activity other than their ideal: “nothing is worth doing unless it is the full workout”. But remember we are looking to create and embed a new habit, which requires a different approach.

So don’t stop at “I don’t want to do this workout, therefore I won’t do anything.” Keep asking “what would I do, no matter how small?” That might be something that seems almost pointless, like “cycle for 5 minutes” or “do a mobility exercise.” If that’s the case then fine - commit to doing this small thing every day or at least every other day. Do it until it feels almost like second nature - now you have a basic foundation upon which to build: “I’m used to doing XYZ in this space.” Then start building from there - add something else or make it a bit longer. Build it up step by step, and if you keep at it you’ll soon find yourself able to do a workout from home without finding it such a chore.

And yes, this might sound frustrating and overly slow, but it’s much better to achieve your ideal workout schedule within say 3 months of patiently building it up than dooming yourself to the incessant yo-yo inconsistency you’ve been engaging in beforehand because you refuse to accept anything less than the ideal. None of us are above basic neurochemistry I’m afraid, and in taking this approach you’re working with your brain instead of against it. Just like you need to practise a technical skill to become proficient in it, you need to build up a habit.

Behavioural strategies aside though, you are still essentially now relying entirely on yourself to motivate yourself in this space, when previously you might have outsourced your motivation to others. It’s easy to feed off the gym environment and other people, or alternatively something like nature if you’re out running - there’s nothing like taking in a magnificent view or morning sunrise to uplift you on a run, walk or bike ride. But your living room or garage likely lacks those kinds of external sources of inspiration, and behavioural strategies like the above still need an emotional or motivational impetus behind them, otherwise you won’t remain focused.

So it is also worth considering what kind of psychological space that you want to create for yourself. You will need to come up with an engaging focus for your activities that will give them sufficient meaning and make them a rewarding experience, in the absence of external stimuli - it’s all on you now. And this is actually a fantastic opportunity - if you can find a way to bring the sense of importance this activity has for you right into the room by yourself, that is an impressive psychological development.

Unlike the strategies above, this isn’t something I can simply tell you how to do in a Substack post unfortunately - forging a new psychological approach to an activity like exercise relies on significant personal reflection. But I can offer the following questions for you to reflect on:

• What would make the process of engaging in this workout feel important, enjoyable and even exciting?

• Why is engaging in the process of trying to instil this habit worthwhile in itself for me, beyond the workouts themselves?

• What is sufficiently important about this workout/physical activity that would make you consider putting the time and effort into making a habit of doing it at home?

  
  

To being in some existential ideas, this is also an opportunity to work on your delayed gratification. It’s so easy to lose interest in something we don’t feel we can achieve or make dramatic progress with quickly, but in this challenge is an opportunity. What kinds of benefits might come from cultivating the ability to wait this out, to keep chipping away and give yourself the chance to experience something different? It’s actually so easy to do just 5 minutes a day - that’s all you need to do to create a foundation, and who knows what might come of that if you keep building.

And every time you do that tiny little fragment of physical activity in your new home exercise space that feels “pointless”, take note of the fact that you just chose to do something that feels arduous and boring. You overcame your impulses and emotions and made a values-based decision - that’s awesome. What other applications might that have?

Chloe

Psychology of Movement