Derek Burnett
Derek Burnett is a Contributing Writer at Bottom Line Personal, where he writes frequently on health and wellness. He is also a contributing editor with Reader’s Digest magazine.
Maybe it’s that little voice inside your head telling you to do the right thing, or maybe it’s your doctor’s voice loud and clear telling you that it’s time to get off the couch. Whatever is prompting you to get back into working out…congratulations! You’re about to course-correct in one of the most important aspects of life, which is your health and well-being.
But it can be quite daunting, especially if you’ve been away from exercise for a long time. Has it been months? Years? Decades? Will your body be able to handle it? Will you manage to stick with it? Will it just feel really awful? Wouldn’t it feel much better to just stay in bed or on the couch?
If these are the kinds of thoughts you’re having, don’t worry. You’re certainly not the first person to go back to exercising after a long break, and just about everyone who has ever done so has had similar thoughts and feelings. Talk long enough to even the most experienced, dedicated athletes, and you’ll probably find that there have been hiatuses in their exercise careers when work, injury, raising a family, studying, or other factors got between them and working out. The key for them, as it will be for you, is smartly overcoming the inertia and negative thinking that make this a challenge.
As you restart your fitness journey, take some time to think about what’s driving you. Are you going to start working out again because you love how you used to feel when you were more fit? Is it to look better in a swimsuit? Is it because you want to live longer? Is it because you’re concerned about a health problem such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, or dementia? Your reasons for working out are nobody’s business but your own, but being mindful of them in an explicit way can help you remain motivated. It may feel silly to do, but consider writing up a contract with yourself, or a mission statement with end goals, since committing something to paper helps to certify it psychologically. If you can boil your motivations down to a few words, they can become a mantra to reach for during moments of discouragement (for example, It’s all about the grandkids, or, beach body 2026). The most important thing is that your motivations be sincerely held. If you’re going to be working out because it seems like the popular thing to do, or because your spouse has been nagging you to do so, you might have a hard time sticking to it or putting in sufficient effort to see gains. What do you want for your own selfish reasons?
Once you’ve recommitted yourself to working out, it can be tempting to put a lot of time and energy into designing your new routine. You might spend hours online shopping for workout clothes and equipment, or poring over spreadsheets as you plan your new exercise program. While it’s somewhat true that “failure to plan is planning to fail,” there is a point of diminishing returns here. That’s thanks to a phenomenon called the “anticipatory dopamine response,” where thinking, planning, and imagining a future event bring just as much joy as the event itself. At its extreme, savoring the anticipatory dopamine hit devolves into “maladaptive daydreaming,” in which fantasy takes the place of action. If you’ve already gotten a good solid dopamine hit from shopping for running pants or from crafting a carefully calibrated plan, you might never feel the need to actually start working out. Nike’s “Just Do It’ is a rare example of real wisdom in a marketing slogan.
You don’t need to lay out a ton of goals, but having one to three SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goals at a time is a good way to stay motivated. The best goals share key features…as the acronym says, they’re specific, they’re achievable, and they’re measurable. Consider the following examples and what makes them good or not-so-good goals.
Within each broad goal, set measurable, achievable stepping-stones. For example, the goal of bench pressing 135 pounds by January 1 might include the following stepping-stones:
You can and should put your all into accomplishing your goals and stepping-stones, but at the same time allow a part of yourself to understand that their real purpose is to keep you moving. Once you accomplish a goal, it’s not time to quit but to set another one. The overarching goal is to achieve a healthy lifestyle in which exercise is a constant. The goals and stepping-stones you set along the way are just there to put wind in your sails.
If you’ve stopped working out, you might look around and realize that you no longer hang out with people who exercise. In fact, there might even be people in your life who actively discourage you from working out, often out of their own insecurity. Joining a gym or community center is an excellent way to find likeminded people who encourage each other to keep working out and striving toward their goals. Most places in the country have running clubs, informal sports leagues, Facebook groups and other organizations where you can interact with people who love working out as much as you do.
A common mistake made by people getting back into working out is to attempt to pick up right where they left off…way back in high school, for some of them. Appalled at how much athleticism they’ve lost, they quit in disgust. Others simply overestimate what they’re capable of and suffer so badly from muscle soreness and shin splints after their first workout that they assume they’re now simply too old to work out. After getting clearance from your doctor, ease very gently into your first few workouts. In fact, take what you were planning to do and cut it in half, whether that means duration or intensity or both. You want to leave those first back-in-the-gym workouts feeling pleasantly fatigued and just sore enough to warrant a sense of accomplishment. If you’re super-goal-oriented, you might worry that you’re not getting enough done in those first few workouts and that you’ll never hit your milestones if you start out too slow. But when your body is ready for it, you’ll naturally increase the difficulty of your workouts, possibly leapfrogging ahead once your body and mind have adapted.
Choose activities that you enjoy. Whenever possible, add fun, games, and variety to your workouts. Bring a grandchild along on your evening walk. Create surprise workouts from a “grab-bag” of cardio activities chosen at random…for example, drawing slips of paper that result in 10 minutes on the rowing machine, 10 minutes jumping rope, and 10 minutes on the elliptical. Listen to your favorite podcast. Crank up the music. Challenge yourself to make it past that utility pole in 15 seconds.
This means taking rest days and allowing yourself some rewards for a job well done. If you’ve hit a milestone, take a day off. Celebrate with some pizza. Then get back to it.
It also means that you must allow yourself to succeed rather than punish yourself for perceived failures. If you miss a goal, reflect back on your reason for having set that goal…It was never so much strictly about the goal, but rather to keep you active, wasn’t it? And if you showed up and put in the work but still didn’t hit the goal, then you accomplished your larger purpose and should be proud of yourself. And if you’ve lapsed, that doesn’t mean defeat. It simply means that Old You dropped the ball. Luckily, New You always awaits to pick it back up.
