Comment by pydry
3 years ago
>Examples: rock climbing, mountain biking, sailing, surfing, skating, skiing.
Doing those every day sounds both expensive and an organizational nightmare.
I love skiing and i do it every few years but I cant rely upon it for exercise.
I tried badminton / frisbee in the park but that still needs geographically close, willing partners who are willing to exert themselves with matching schedules and good weather.
In the end i solved the motivation/availability problem by being 25 seconds away from a reliable heavy HIIT cardio + anerobic workout - having a rowing machine at home. It's overall less fun than skiing perhaps but the barrier to entry being negligible makes all the difference.
A lot of these are lifestyle sports that come with the benefit of a built in community.
Sailing - boat club
Climbing - gym
Surfing - the other folks at the spot
Skiing - lift/lodge people (also if you really care about skiing all the time you probably move to SLC or somewhere that can accommodate that)
Once you have that community, the "willing partners" part kind of solves itself.
Right. Still left with weather, cost, locational dependency and organizational issues though.
Anyway, "just move to SLC and ski" is clearly A solution to the problem of "i cant motivate myself to exercise" but it's a fairly drastic one.
It's the "love your job and you'll never work a day in your life" theory of exercise. For me, I struggle to stick to training without a trainer, but I'll happily climb or ski or hike for hours because they are "peak experiences" - pun intended.
If folks are reading this and thinking about how to reduce friction to start exercising - putting all the equipment in your house is one approach. (I made it work in the pandemic, although downstairs neighbors can limit what you can do....) But the pull of finding something that puts you into flow state or has a social accountability component like Crossfit can be worth the "issues."
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