How to get motivated to exercise: 5 tips to overcome inertia

By Leying Tang, CNN

During the middle of winter in the Northern Hemisphere, the days are cold, dark and short. It’s not an inspiring time to accomplish much of anything, much less those New Year’s resolutions that so motivated you back on December 31.

Early backsliders may have already called it quits. Twenty-eight percent of people who make resolutions have dropped at least some of them by the end of January, and 13% report they have dropped them all, according to a 2024 Pew Research Center survey.

Of course, health-related resolutions, such as exercising more, often top people’s lists of resolutions, according to a poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Getting more physical activity is a worthy goal: Science has proved many times over that movement is beneficial to our overall physical health — it improves our mental well-being and contributes to longevity and happiness.

Still, simply being aware of the benefits doesn’t always translate into sticking to a resolution to exercise more, day in and day out.

“Why aren’t people moving their bodies if they know exercise is good for them?” psychologist Diana Hill posed to CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta recently on his podcast, Chasing Life. “We know it’s good for us physically. … Mortality rates go down, cancer rates go down. But only about a quarter of us are actually doing it.”

When it comes to starting to move, Hill said, many folks are able to come up with plenty of reasons not to — whether it’s the general “I don’t have enough time” excuse or the more specific “I’m on my feet all day.”

“There’s a lot of inner barriers, psychological barriers to moving our bodies,” she said.

Hill’s recent book, coauthored with biomechanist Katy Bowman, is “I Know I Should Exercise, But…: 44 Reasons We Don’t Move and How To Get Over Them.” Hill and Bowman run through all those reasons people use to avoid exercise, work through how the brain is trying to trick you and explain how to overcome that particular trap.

You can listen to the full episode here.

“Motivation is more of a wave than it is a consistent thing,” Hill said. You may sign up for an afternoon exercise class after listening to this podcast in the morning, but by the time the class rolls around, your motivation may have already waned, she added.

How can you keep up your motivation to exercise throughout the dreary days of February and beyond? Hill has these five tips.

Change your relationship with time

One of the top reasons why people say no to exercise is because they feel they don’t have enough time, Hill said.

That excuse, she pointed out, actually has more to do with an individual’s relationship to time.

“Movement has been sectioned off into leisure time,” she told Gupta on the podcast. “Many of us feel like we’re having to choose: ‘Do I go to the gym after work, do my bike ride or do I go get groceries?’”

Hill encouraged people to shift from this “either/or” mindset to a “both/and” mindset, which opens up more possibilities.

“We can integrate our exercise and our movement into the time that we have,” she said. “When I’m at the airport, I will carry my bags up the stairs just like a farmer’s carry.”

She also uses time at her son’s baseball games to walk around the field cheering him on, instead of sitting on the sidelines.

Your perception of how much time you feel you have — a concept called “time affluence” — is influenced by how you are spending your time, Hill said.

“Our time affluence is malleable,” she said. “When we are doing things that are meaningful, we feel like we have more time.”

By moving your body in more intentional ways, you might end up feeling like you have more time as a result, she said.

Tap into the source of your motivation

Knowing exercise is good for physical and mental health may not be a strong enough motivator for some.

“It has to be individualized and personalized to you,” Hill told Gupta.

Achieving better health is the motivating factor to get physically active for her 77-year-old neighbor who had a heart attack in his late 60s. “I see the guy jogging down our street at 12 o’clock pretty much every day reliably,” she said.

But Hill is not always motivated by knowing movement will help improve her health. What drives her is spending quality time with her 13-year-old son. He asked her to join him on his upcoming middle school bike trip — an outing she dreaded, because she feared “being out of control” and falling off her bike.

“It was this moment where, wow, I’ve written a book on movement, and I’m unwilling to move my body because it’s too scary,” she told Gupta.  But she tapped into her intrinsic motivation and said yes.

The few weeks she spent with her son, learning from him how to ride a bike, were special and also translated into other parts of her life.

“I’m also learning about myself of how to be taught something, how to do something that’s outside of my comfort zone in the service of something I care about,” she said. It’s good to stop before automatically saying no to things in life because they’re scary or they’re uncomfortable, she noted.

Set up your home for movement

Create a space that actively funnels you toward physical activity as opposed to the couch, even if you are coming home exhausted after a long day of work.

Hill’s home has a TV room, but instead of a couch it has a basketball hoop and two rings that hang from the ceiling, she told Gupta, adding that when she and her family watch games, they also play alongside the pros.

While that kind of extreme solution might not be right for or available to everyone, you can do something as simple as leaving your walking shoes by the front door. That way, you can slip them on and take a walk outside without a lot of inner debate.

As a bonus, the exercise itself will in turn generate good feelings by increasing levels of dopamine and serotonin, two mood-enhancing neurotransmitters, that will reinforce the behavior.

Practice self-compassion

Having concerns about your body image or your athletic ability is natural, Hill said, so be kind to yourself.

How can you be self-compassionate? Imagine speaking to yourself the way you would talk to a friend or loved one, Hill recommended. For example, what would you tell your daughter who’s ashamed of the way she moves her body during a yoga class?

“When you’re self-compassionate, you’re kind, you are mindful. You turn your attention back to just what is happening right now,” she told CNN.

Self-compassion also taps into our shared humanity, Hill said. Many people in that yoga class may be grappling with something — perhaps an image issue or chronic pain — but what is going on below the surface may not be apparent. Hill said she developed an eating disorder when she was young and struggled with overexercising to burn off calories.

“Many of us feel like we’re not normal, but that’s because there is no normal,” she said. “When you treat yourself with compassion, you may also see other people through more compassionate eyes.”

Establish manageable exercise goals

Make your commitments small enough so that you can accomplish them every day and build from there.

If you get home after a long day, can you put on your sneakers and walk outside for two minutes instead of committing to 10 minutes?

Hill said every hour, during the 10-minute break between clients, she stretches her body or walks around the proverbial block. These 10-minute bite-size sessions add up to a 60-minute workout when she does it six times a day.

In the end, physical activity is not just about improving your health, she said, it also helps you become who you want to be and how you want to contribute to this world, which will ripple out and impact the people in your life.

“If you want a motivation that’s sustained over the long run, make it a big motivation that’s bigger than just you,” she said.

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CNN Podcasts’ Andrea Kane contributed to this report.