(01-17-2015, 06:28 PM)Sastra Wrote: It (and some light social awkwardness) prevents me from signing up to gyms and such, one thing is that it's good to do something for myself, but it really kills me a bit when no one else has any sort of belief that I'll be able to stick to attending it.
I think the trick here is to find something that you really *like*, so that you're not "sigh, going to work out now", you're just doing the things you like.
I love bicycling, for instance, so that's a part of my exercise regimen. I also love rowing crew (which was a surprise for me when I discovered this), so I added that. I'm not ultra-serious about either (I'm a fair weather bicycle commuter, I do some recreational rowing, too), but they form the foundation of how I exercise. Both bicycling and rowing are seriously aerobic, and and aerobic fitness is one of those things that's pretty painful (metaphorically and literally) to develop, so I tend to keep up with them during the off-season, simply to spare myself the misery when it warms up of getting back into them.
Since both bicycling and rowing benefit from strength training, too, I do a three-times-a-week workout involving weights. It's not terribly complex - four exercises that take about 20 minutes total to do, plus a fifth that I have to do to compensate for a motorcycling injury.
The result of all this is an exercise program that keeps me reasonably fit and doesn't really take willpower. The only gym stuff I do are the weights (which I could do at home, if I really cared about it) and rowing on an erg. And the erg is fun (I'm a masochist), because it's rowing!
A little postscript about rowing, by the way, though it applies to a lot of team sports: The club I row for, like most rowing clubs, has a learn to row program. It was a 6 week commitment, and they taught me everything I needed to get started. Everyone else in the class was just as new as me, so we were all in the same boat. Rowing is certainly a team sport, in that you're in a boat with a bunch of other folks and you're all working together to make it go, so everyone encouraged each other. It made it a really nice, positive experience. Instead of feeling crappy about my poor rowing skills and my poor rowing fitness while holding up a bunch of experienced rowers, I was with people who were (literally!) in the same boat as me.
