What to do When You Don’t Want to Workout

In North America, we’ve just survived reached the end of our first week in daylight savings time. The clocks jumped forward an hour on Sunday and yet the impacts of just 1 hour time change could be felt for days afterwards. For those of us with corporate girlie jobs and an active social life on the weekends, I know that this week took all of your will-power to get you to the gym.

Even for myself, who has been consistently going to the gym every week since the start of the year and would say that I have a pretty good habit built around going to the gym, I found this week was tough.

Which got me thinking. There’s probably a few of you out there who felt the same way and wished you had some tools or mantras to help you get to the gym, even on the days where you’re feeling absolutely exhausted.

So in this blog, I’ll share my tried and true methods to stick with the schedule, even on the days that I really don’t want to workout.

A Good Habit will Always Make it Easier

This week when I woke up feeling so tired and weak, I really considered just skipping the gym. All of the usual excuses ran through my mind:

• “I’ll be too tired to do anything after, which will impact my progress at work”
• “I won’t enjoy the workout if I can’t give my full effort at the gym”
• “What if going today means I really can’t go tomorrow?”
• “Rest days are good for me!”

Last year when I really didn’t have great habits around getting myself to the gym, any of these excuses would have been enough to send me back to bed, sleeping in way later than I wanted to, and likely kicking off another 1-2 week stint where I just didn’t go to the gym at all.

But this year, I have been consistently waking up at 5AM, putting on my gym gear, drinking my pre-workout, selecting my workout music, and walking to the gym at least 3x per week. I’ve been so consistent with it, that I am now waking up before my alarm at 5AM and have added in a 5th day to some weeks.

I’ve worked really hard and pushed through some very low-energy days to build this habit because I know that when I am consistent, everything else in my life improves. My sleep is better, my confidence and self-esteem improve, my skin improves, my eating habits typically improve, and my focus and energy at work and in my social life improve.

All this to say, building the habit has been really important to me and I’ve been really intentional about building this habit. And now all of that time and energy that I have put into building this habit has reached its first real test.

So when I woke up on Wednesday and Thursday morning this week, feeling so tired and so weak, I ran through all of the excuses but then I thought about all the work I’ve put in this year. I can’t let myself down and decided it was more important to figure out why I should go to the gym, despite those excuses.

My habit made all of the steps between waking up and arriving at the gym easier. I just let my body go on autopilot and all of a sudden I was at the gym. When I got there, I deployed my next strategy that keeps me working out, even when I really don’t want to.

It Is Okay to Modify Your Workouts to Match Your Energy Level

One of roots of the excuses I mentioned in the previous section is this need for things to be “perfect”. This is something I work on every day, and the practice I have built around letting go of the idea of perfect gives me the space to arrive at the gym when I’m tired and just get something done, instead of trying to get the “perfect” workout done.

This is the basis of the next strategy that helps me workout when I really don’t want to workout. I tell myself to just get there so that I can keep up the habit, and then when I am there I figure what I can realistically do given my energy levels, and what would be something that would still make me feel like I had a good workout.

If you’ve been following the blog, you’ll know that I love deadlift day. Deadlift day is usually Thursday, and this Thursday, following the clocks jumping up an hour, I was especially tired. My legs were still sore from my squat workout on Monday and I was still working through the fact that I went to the gym the day before and had to modify my workout.

I really wanted to have a good deadlift workout, especially because I was feeling so good the week before, but that just wasn’t in the cards if I wanted to prevent an injury. So I decided I would do my deadlifts, but I’d really scale back the weight I was lifting.

I went from lifting 150lbs for 10 reps/set, to struggling to lift 95lbs for 6 reps. I was a little disappointed at first, but just reminded myself that today was about doing just enough. So I got through the next 3 sets and as it progressed, the weight started to feel a little easier and I was also able to make a small correction to my form in the process.

Once the deadlifts were done, I chose some accessory exercises that were bodyweight and wouldn’t be too difficult, but would still target the muscles that I would have targeted with heavy exercises like hip thrusts and leg curls on the machine.

The strategy here is to get to the gym, or your workout class, or whatever your exercise environment of choice is, and then figure out what you know you can do safely and will still keep you on track towards your health goals. Not every week has to be perfect. What is important is staying consistent with your workout routine, and then modifying the workout according to your energy levels on the day.

Train Your Brain to be Resilient

This really should say train your mind to be resilient, but train your brain sounds better. In any case, I really believe this is the most important step in ensuring you get to the gym even when you don’t want to.

When you look at habits, this is all about adopting a mindset that supports you staying consistent with your habits. And then when you have the habit of getting yourself to the gym, it is important to have a patient and gracious mindset around what type of workout you can do on your most tired days.

I want to acknowledge that this is not easy. I know from experience, and want to quickly share another anecdote to help you understand where I started and what it took to get me to where I am now (which isn’t perfect, but it’s the most resilient I’ve felt in a long time).

For a long time I would set goals for myself and start a new health journey or workout routine, and before I had even started, a little voice in my head would say “you’ll probably give up at some point anyways, so don’t get too attached to this idea.” I had accepted this false narrative about myself and allowed myself to feel like I couldn’t trust myself to actually stick something out.

I don’t remember when exactly I had this moment of reflection, but I was really thinking about this one day and felt sad for myself. What in life could make me believe to my core that I can’t trust myself to actually follow through with anything? I have set many goals in my life and accomplished them, so I know that I can, but for some reason, the dominating thought was that I shouldn’t commit to anything, because I’ll give up on it later, or some bad habit will get in the way of me accomplishing my goals.

So I had some compassion for myself in that moment, and decided from that day onward that I would change the mental script about myself. I can only accomplish my goals when I trust myself to take the necessary steps to achieve those same goals.

This takes regular reminders, and I go to bed every night repeating different combinations of “I am” statements to rewire and rewrite those negative scripts in my mind.

I know first hand how hard this is so I just want to extend that same compassion that I showed myself to you reading this right now. Someone or some event in your life took away that confidence and trust that you have in yourself. Make today the day you take that back. You absolutely can and will achieve your goals because you know exactly what it takes to get there. And if you don’t have all the tools now, know that simply by reading this blog you know how to find the resources that will help you achieve your goal.

You have absolutely got this, and I really hope that if you haven’t started this already, that you make today the first day you start telling yourself that you trust yourself to do what is right for you and your health journey.

Building this trust in yourself is crucial and will be very helpful on the days when your old excuses try to claw their way back into your life.

I heard someone say recently that when your body starts to experience the benefits of a new habit, it will try to revert back to its old, comfortable ways because the new-ness of the habit the way your body feels is something that the body has to learn to adapt to. It is always easier to go back to what is familiar for the body. With that in mind, you just have to say “not this time” to those old thoughts and the self-sabotage.

Resist your body’s urge to go back to what was comfortable, and force it to adapt to- and accept this new, healthier, happier, more energetic, more confident normal.

Once you’ve mastered this, then step 1 and 2 are so much easier, and tired days, weak days, or even the first day back after feeling sick or recovering from an injury are so much easier to overcome.

In the words of Winnie the Pooh: