Beginners should feel pleasure and discomfort in training to create a habit

Katy Kennedy’s first attempt to develop the habit of running was a failure. She signed up for a half marathon, struggled up and down the hills in her neighborhood to prepare, then struggled through the entire race.

“I walked the last mile, and somebody yelled at me, ‘Run!’ I was like, ‘I can’t,'” recalled Kennedy, now a professor at the University of Chichester in Britain. “It was awful, actually. I thought I was going to die. So I gave up running for ten years.”

At the next opportunity, she decided to do things differently. “I wanted to have a more pleasant experience,” she said. “And I thought, how can I learn to enjoy running?”

That question eventually propelled his doctoral research into the experiences of beginning runners — how they feel and how it affects their ability to stick with the new habit. And according to colleagues in the emerging field of exercise psychology, the answers are far more important to long-term physical and mental health than the monotonous details of how long, how hard or how often you exercise. After all, no exercise regimen is effective if you don’t follow it.

But the connection between how an exercise routine makes you feel and whether you’re going to keep doing it six months from now isn’t as simple as it sounds.

If it makes you unhappy, like Kennedy’s first experience with running, you’re probably going to give up. If it’s too easy, on the other hand, you might find it boring – or, perhaps worse, useless. The most committed practitioners usually crave a certain amount of discomfort.

So if you’re trying to form an exercise habit, how do you know when to avoid suffering and when to accept it?

Why pleasure is useful

According to one estimate, 97% of people agree that physical activity is important for health. And a study of 3,500 American adults who used wearable devices to track exercise habits found that only 3.2% of them actually reached the recommended limit of 150 minutes of moderate activity per week.

One theory for this gap between intentions and actions is that we’re too busy to exercise, which has given rise to ultra-short, high-intensity interval training over the past decade.

But Panteleimon Ekkekakis, an exercise psychologist and chair of the kinesiology department at Michigan State University, believes the explanation is more visceral: For many people, exercise feels really unpleasant.

Of course, in the midst of a grueling workout, even gym lovers often rate their experience as unpleasant, and new practitioners often hate it. But afterwards, according to Ekkekakis, pretty much everyone feels good.

This feeling can happen simply because it feels so good to finish the workout. Or maybe it’s because your body produces its own version of opioid pain relievers — endorphins — during intense exercise, which leaves you with a lingering positive feeling and desire to get back in the gym.

Research, however, suggests that feeling light after a workout does not correlate with long-term exercise routine. Instead, how you feel during your workout is a stronger predictor. If the first few workouts in the pool or gym are very hard, you can assume that hardness is inevitable.

Kennedy often sees this among beginning runners: “They would say, ‘Well, I’m feeling bad, but running is supposed to make you feel bad. So I’m going to keep going at that pace rather than just slowing down or walking.’

That’s the wrong attitude, Kennedy said; if you’re having trouble, relax a little. And consider what could make your experience more enjoyable. When she returned to running herself, for example, she prioritized running with others, giving herself permission to walk uphill, and bought comfortable shoes and a supportive bra.

Distracting yourself with music, video, or even virtual reality can also lessen discomfort. And subtle tweaks to your environment, like removing mirrors and avoiding critical observers, can make the workout experience more enjoyable, Ekkekakis said.

How you think about your workout makes a difference. For example, a 2018 study by researchers at Tufts University and the US Army Cognitive Science Team found that running felt easier when subjects thought about it in a dispassionate, less negative way, such as imagining they were scientists or journalists. examining the race objectively in the moment.

Why pain is useful

The underlying assumption is that humans are programmed to seek pleasure and avoid suffering. However, this is habitually belied by our behaviors: eating chili peppers, climbing icy mountains, sweating in overheated saunas.

Paul Bloom, a psychologist at the University of Toronto whose 2021 book “The Sweet Spot” explored this paradox, has suggested that unpleasantly intense workouts can serve several purposes. Not only does stopping feel good, but exerting yourself is a temporary escape from distractions and worries.

Bloom also argued that humans are not pure hedonists – we, too, seek meaning. And meaning, he said, is often closely tied to suffering.

Significant life events, such as having children, or occupations, such as being a teacher or doing military service, often involve considerable sacrifice and struggle. Similarly, researchers found that people value furniture they’ve assembled themselves 63% more than the same pre-assembled furniture.

“People avoid effort, but it’s also something we can learn to enjoy,” said Michael Inzlicht, a colleague of Bloom’s at the University of Toronto. In addition to pleasure, humans seek things like competence, mastery, and self-understanding. “You can’t achieve this without trying,” he said.

The tens of thousands of people who signed up for the New York City Marathon this fall may nod in agreement, but newer runners are generally less willing to seek discomfort. To what extent can the appetite for pain be cultivated?

Inzlicht and his colleagues created a meaning-of-effort scale to measure how much purpose people derive from doing difficult things.

Some perform difficult tasks grudgingly, dragging themselves to the gym just because they know it will do them good. “But others, you might call them happy workers, that’s what they live for,” he said. “It’s what helps them make sense of the world.”

The argument in favor of suffering in training, then, is that acquiring a taste for it offers a more lasting incentive to stick to the routine.

New unpublished work from Inzlicht’s lab suggests that, with the right encouragement, people can gradually adopt the “joyful worker” perspective. For starters, Inzlicht suggested “crawling in effort”: include some 30-second spikes, for example. So take the lead from video game designers, he said, and keep increasing the difficulty of future workouts just enough to keep you interested without getting discouraged.

find a middle ground

Even elite athletes don’t seek pain every time they walk out the door. In fact, they rarely do.

In the early 2000s, Stephen Seiler, a sports scientist from Texas who recently moved to Norway, began analyzing the training habits of elite athletes in a variety of endurance sports, including rowing, cross-country skiing, cycling and running. .

What he found contradicted the “no pain, no gain” philosophy he had encountered in his own career as a competitive rower.

In all sports, the best athletes seemed to spend about 80% of their training time with relatively low effort. The other 20% were very tough. This “polarized” training distribution, as it became known, allowed athletes to accumulate large amounts of exercise without burning out, while still reaping the benefits of high-intensity training.

This 80/20 split allows professionals and weekend warriors alike to balance pleasure and meaning.

During low-intensity workouts, athletes chat with friends, enjoy the scenery, and generally have fun. High-intensity training is difficult, but researchers have found that elite athletes find these exercises the most satisfying. If you’re working out four times a week, for example, pick one day to push yourself and keep the other three easy.

A simple test of whether you’re taking it easy on lighter days is your ability to speak out loud in complete sentences — which may require you to slow down more than you expected. As for hard days, that depends on your experience level and your tastes, but they should at least include brief periods of prolonged discomfort.

In the end, the question of whether your workout should be painful or pleasurable can be misguided, Inzlicht said. “I really think it’s both,” he said.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves