How to Stick to Exercise When You Always Give Up – My Tips
I can’t be the only person who has started a new exercise routine absolutely convinced that this time will be different. I’ve bought new trainers, downloaded apps, planned which days I’m going to exercise and somehow imagined that the person who struggled to exercise once a week was suddenly going to happily do it five times a week.
For the first week or so, it can actually work. Starting something new is quite exciting and motivation carries you along. You might even find yourself wondering why you didn’t start sooner.
Then real life comes along. You have a rubbish day, you’re tired, something unexpected happens or you simply don’t fancy exercising. One missed workout becomes two and before you know it, you’re telling yourself you’ll start again on Monday.
I’ve done this plenty of times, and for years I thought it meant I just wasn’t very good at sticking to exercise. I assumed people who exercised regularly had some sort of motivation that I didn’t have. Now I think the problem was often the plans I was making rather than my ability to stick to them.
If your exercise routine only works when you’re feeling enthusiastic, have plenty of spare time and nothing goes wrong, it probably isn’t going to last very long.
Learning how to stick to exercise is much more about finding something that fits into your ordinary life, including the tired and can’t-be-bothered days.
Why do I keep starting exercise and giving up?
I think one of the biggest problems is that we tend to make exercise plans when we’re at our most motivated. Perhaps you’ve decided you want to lose weight, seen a photo of yourself you don’t like or had one of those sudden bursts of enthusiasm where you decide you’re going to sort your whole life out at once.
At that moment, exercising four or five times a week sounds completely achievable. You imagine the version of yourself who gets up early for a workout, walks 10,000 steps every day and perhaps goes swimming at the weekend for good measure.
The trouble is that you’re designing your routine for the most motivated version of yourself rather than the person who actually has to follow it several weeks later.
I think a much better question is not “How much exercise could I possibly fit in?” but “What could I realistically keep doing on a fairly rubbish week?”
If the answer is two 20-minute sessions, start there. You can always add more later if you want to. Starting with less doesn’t mean you’re not taking exercise seriously; it means you’re giving yourself a chance of turning it into something normal rather than another short-lived project.
Stop waiting until you feel motivated to exercise
Motivation is lovely when it turns up, but I wouldn’t build an exercise routine that depends on it.
Think about all the other things you do regularly. You probably don’t wake up feeling incredibly motivated to brush your teeth, put the bins out or do the washing. You do them because they’ve found a place in your normal routine.
Exercise can become a little more like that too.
It doesn’t mean you’ll reach a point where you’re delighted about every workout. Some days you’ll fancy it and some days you’d much rather stay on the sofa. The difference is that if exercise has a reasonably predictable place in your week, you don’t have to make a fresh decision about it every time.
For example, perhaps you go for a walk after work on Tuesdays and Thursdays, swim on Saturday mornings or do a short home workout after breakfast. Having a rough when is often much easier than deciding that you’ll exercise “at some point today”, because somehow that mysterious point in the day has a habit of never arriving.
Start with an exercise goal that feels almost too easy
There’s a strange belief around exercise that if something feels easy, it isn’t really worthwhile. We see recommendations about workouts lasting 30, 45 or 60 minutes and assume anything shorter doesn’t count.
That can make starting incredibly difficult if you’re currently doing very little.
If you haven’t exercised regularly for months, you don’t need to immediately commit to five workouts a week. Try two. If half an hour feels daunting, start with ten or fifteen minutes.
What matters initially is establishing the habit of actually doing it.
I would much rather plan two short workouts and complete them consistently than promise myself five workouts, manage them for one week and then stop altogether. Once those two sessions start feeling like an ordinary part of your week, you can decide whether you want to make them longer or add something else.
This is particularly important if you’re starting exercise when you’re very unfit or carrying a lot of extra weight. Your starting point might look completely different from somebody else’s, and that’s fine.
Easy Exercise Routine for Beginners
Exercise for Overweight and Obese Beginners
Find exercise you actually like – or at least don’t hate!
There’s a lot of advice telling us to “find an exercise you love”, and I’m not sure everybody is ever going to love exercise. You don’t need to suddenly become someone who can’t wait to get to the gym.
I do think, however, that it’s worth finding something you don’t absolutely hate.
If you’ve tried running repeatedly and despised every second of it, you don’t have to keep trying to turn yourself into a runner. If gyms make you miserable, there are other ways to be active. Walking, cycling, swimming, dancing, exercise classes, strength training and home workouts are all options, and there are plenty more besides.
Even the environment can make a difference. Walking on a treadmill staring at a wall might bore you senseless, while walking somewhere lovely for an hour barely feels like exercise. Someone else might prefer the treadmill precisely because they can put their headphones in and watch Netflix while they walk.
There isn’t a best form of exercise that everyone needs to do. The activity that burns slightly more calories isn’t necessarily the better choice if you hate it so much that you stop doing it after a fortnight.
Don’t make weight loss the only measure of whether exercise is working
This is something I’ve had to change my own thinking about over the years.
When so much of my life revolved around losing weight, exercise was often about burning calories. I’d exercise and then expect the scales to provide some sort of confirmation that I’d done well. If I’d worked hard and my weight didn’t go down, it was incredibly easy to wonder what the point had been.
The problem is that the scales are a terrible way of measuring whether one particular workout was worthwhile.
Exercise can improve your fitness, strength, stamina and physical function regardless of what happens to your weight that week. You might notice you’re less out of breath walking somewhere, can manage stairs more easily or don’t need to stop as often on a longer walk. Perhaps you’re able to lift heavier weights or do an exercise that felt impossible a couple of months ago.
Those improvements matter.
I think exercise becomes much easier to stick to when it stops being something you do purely to make yourself smaller. Losing weight may still be one of your goals, but it doesn’t have to be the only reason you move your body.
Exercise doesn’t need to compensate for what you’ve eaten
This goes alongside the previous point because it’s another trap I’ve fallen into.
Exercise can easily become punishment for food. You eat more than you intended and decide you need an extra-long walk to burn it off, or you look at the calorie number on your watch and start mentally calculating what you’ve “earned” for dinner.
It turns movement into a transaction, and for me that isn’t a particularly healthy or enjoyable way to live.
You don’t need to punish yourself with exercise because you ate pizza yesterday, and you don’t need to restrict your food because you missed a workout today. Exercise is something you can do because being active is good for your health and because you want to improve your fitness, strength or mobility.
Separating exercise from guilt around food can make it feel much less like something you have to do because you’ve been “bad”.
Make it as easy as possible to actually start
Sometimes it isn’t the workout itself that puts us off. It’s everything involved in getting started.
You need to find your trainers, decide what workout you’re doing, change your clothes, find your headphones and perhaps drive to the gym. None of those things is particularly difficult on its own, but when you’re already tired, they become excellent reasons to decide you’ll do it tomorrow instead.
Removing a few of those barriers can make a surprising difference.
If you’re planning a morning walk, have your clothes ready. If you’re following a home workout, decide which one you’re doing beforehand rather than spending 20 minutes scrolling through videos. If you go to the gym after work, take your kit with you so you don’t have to go home and somehow persuade yourself to leave the house again.
This isn’t about becoming ridiculously organised. It’s simply about making the exercise option slightly easier to choose.
Have a shorter version for the days you can’t be bothered
One thing that has always made exercise harder for me is all-or-nothing thinking. If I’d planned a 45-minute walk but only had 20 minutes, it could feel as though there wasn’t much point going.
Of course there was.
Having a minimum version of your exercise routine is really useful for those days. If your normal walk is 30 minutes, perhaps your minimum is ten. If your home workout usually contains eight exercises, do three.
Sometimes you’ll start your ten-minute walk and decide you feel quite good, so you’ll carry on. Other times you’ll do ten minutes and come home. Either is better than deciding that because you couldn’t do the full version, you may as well do nothing.
This also makes exercise much easier to fit around a busy life. You don’t need to magically discover an uninterrupted hour every day before movement becomes worthwhile.
Missing one workout doesn’t mean you’ve failed
This is probably one of the biggest changes I’d encourage if you’re someone who repeatedly starts exercise and stops.
You are going to miss workouts.
At some point you’ll be ill, go away, have a ridiculously busy week or simply decide you can’t face it. None of those things means your exercise routine has failed.
The danger is what happens next.
I used to be terrible for deciding that once I’d missed something, the whole plan was somehow ruined. Rather than simply exercising the next day, I’d decide I’d start again on Monday. If Monday didn’t go to plan, perhaps I’d start the following week instead.
Before long, one missed workout had turned into a month.
Try to think of consistency over a much longer period. If you exercise regularly for a year but miss sessions here and there, you’ve still been consistent. Nobody is handing out medals for perfect attendance.
One idea that can help is trying not to miss your planned exercise twice in a row. Missing one session is just life getting in the way; prioritising the next one helps stop a short break quietly becoming the end of the habit.
Stop restarting every Monday
Monday has an awful lot to answer for when it comes to weight loss and exercise.
There’s something very appealing about the idea of a fresh week. You’ve missed a few workouts, eaten differently from how you’d planned and decide that Monday is when you’ll get back on track.
The problem is that this turns every deviation into something that requires a complete restart.
If you planned to exercise on Tuesday and didn’t, you don’t need a fresh week. You can exercise on Wednesday.
If you haven’t exercised for three weeks, you don’t need to wait until the first of the month, buy another planner or create an elaborate new schedule. You can go for a ten-minute walk this afternoon.
Learning to continue rather than constantly restart has probably been one of the most useful things I’ve realised about changing habits generally, not just exercise.
Track the habit rather than obsessing about calories
Fitness watches and exercise trackers can be really motivating, but they can also make us judge a perfectly good workout by one estimated number.
You go for a lovely walk, get home feeling pleased with yourself and then discover your watch says you’ve burned 160 calories. Suddenly it doesn’t seem quite as impressive.
But you still walked.
If your goal is to make exercise part of your life, I’d concentrate more on whether you actually did it. You could keep a simple calendar and mark every day you’re active, note how long you exercised or keep track of something relevant to the activity, such as how far you can walk comfortably.
Over time you might notice that the walk which used to take 40 minutes takes 35, or that you can go further before you need a break. Perhaps the weights you started with now feel easy.
Those are far more interesting measures of progress than whether your watch thinks Tuesday’s workout burned 217 or 243 calories.
What if you feel self-conscious exercising?
This deserves mentioning because for some people the problem isn’t laziness or lack of motivation at all. It’s embarrassment.
Exercising in a larger body can feel incredibly exposing. You might worry that people at the gym are looking at you, feel uncomfortable in exercise clothes or avoid walking and running outside because you’re conscious of what other people might think.
Simply telling yourself not to care isn’t always enough to make those feelings disappear.
If this is what’s stopping you, start somewhere that feels comfortable. Perhaps that’s exercising at home, walking somewhere quiet or choosing a gym at a less busy time. You might prefer a beginner class where you’re not expected to know what you’re doing, or going with someone you trust.
As your confidence grows, you can decide whether you want to try something else. You don’t need to throw yourself into the environment that makes you most uncomfortable to prove anything.
I’ve written much more about this in my article on how to feel confident exercising at any size, because I think it’s a barrier that’s often overlooked in generic exercise advice.
Don’t compare your exercise with someone else’s
Social media can make starting exercise feel rather ridiculous.
You manage your first 15-minute walk and then open Instagram to someone who’s just run a marathon. You start strength training with small weights while the person next to you in the gym appears capable of lifting a small car.
It can make your own efforts seem insignificant when they’re really not.
The only useful comparison is with your own starting point. If walking for ten minutes left you exhausted six weeks ago and you can now comfortably walk for twenty, that’s progress. It doesn’t matter that somebody else can walk ten miles.
We all start with different bodies, different health, different levels of fitness and different amounts of time available. Trying to follow someone else’s routine when it doesn’t fit your life is a pretty good way to end up giving up again.
Build up slowly when exercise starts getting easier
Once you’ve managed to exercise consistently for a while, you might want to do more. This is where it’s tempting to get enthusiastic again and double everything overnight.
You don’t need to.
Perhaps you make your walks five or ten minutes longer, add another session to your week or gradually increase the resistance you’re using for strength exercises. If you’re following a home workout, you might add a few repetitions or progress to a slightly harder version of an exercise.
Changing one thing at a time gives your body a chance to adapt and makes it less likely that your nice manageable routine suddenly becomes something you dread.
If you’ve only recently started exercising, you might find my easy exercise routine for beginners useful too. It includes simple movements and adaptations rather than assuming “beginner” means you can already manage squats, burpees and planks.
Exercise doesn’t always have to be a workout
Another thing that has changed how I look at exercise is recognising that movement doesn’t have to happen in a gym or involve a workout video.
Walking somewhere beautiful, going swimming, cycling, gardening, dancing around the kitchen or spending a day wandering around somewhere on holiday all involve being active. Some activities will obviously be more intense than others, but movement doesn’t become worthless because you weren’t wearing Lycra while you did it.
This can be particularly useful if you struggle with formal exercise. Instead of trying to force yourself to become somebody who loves the gym, look at ways of being more active that actually fit your life.
I have a whole article about gentle exercise that really counts, which is worth reading if your idea of exercise has become stuck on sweaty workouts and burning as many calories as possible.
What if you genuinely don’t have much time?
There will be periods when life is ridiculously busy. You might be working long hours, caring for someone, dealing with health problems or simply trying to keep everything else going. Sometimes exercise genuinely isn’t going to be your biggest priority.
However, I think we can also fall into the trap of assuming exercise needs a large block of uninterrupted time. If you don’t have 45 minutes, you decide you don’t have time to exercise.
A ten-minute walk at lunchtime is still movement. So is a short workout before you get ready in the morning. You could go for two shorter walks rather than one long one or build more walking into something you’re already doing.
You don’t have to squeeze every possible minute of productivity out of your day, either. Rest matters too. The aim is simply to find an amount of movement that works alongside your life rather than constantly feeling guilty because you haven’t managed the ideal amount.
What if you’re always too tired to exercise?
This is another situation where I don’t particularly like the advice to “just push through it”.
Sometimes you’re ordinary end-of-the-day tired and getting outside for a short walk might actually feel quite nice once you’ve started. On those days, I like the idea of agreeing to do ten minutes and then deciding whether to continue.
Persistent exhaustion is different.
If you’re constantly exhausted despite resting, or your tiredness is affecting your everyday life, it isn’t something you necessarily need to overcome through willpower. There are lots of possible reasons for fatigue, and it’s worth discussing persistent or unexplained tiredness with your GP rather than repeatedly forcing yourself through workouts.
Knowing when to rest is part of looking after yourself too.
How long does it take to make exercise a habit?
You’ve probably heard that it takes 21 days to form a habit. It would be lovely if human behaviour were quite that predictable, but it isn’t.
How quickly exercise starts feeling normal will depend on what you’re trying to do and how easily it fits into your life. A ten-minute walk after lunch is much easier to repeat than a 90-minute gym session that requires travelling across town.
Rather than counting down the days until exercise is supposed to magically become automatic, concentrate on repetition. Keep making the routine achievable and notice when you start doing it with less internal debate.
Eventually, it can become something that simply belongs in your week.
That doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll love every minute of it. It just means you stop having to begin from scratch every single time.
What if you’ve already stopped exercising?
If you’re reading this because you haven’t exercised for weeks or months, you don’t need to recreate whatever you were doing before.
Your fitness may have changed, your circumstances may be different and the routine you used to follow might not suit you anymore.
Start with what feels manageable now.
Perhaps that’s two short walks this week. Maybe it’s one beginner workout at home and a swim at the weekend. It doesn’t matter if it looks unimpressive compared with what you used to do.
The first goal is simply to get moving again without making the return so unpleasant that you immediately stop.
How to make exercise something you actually stick to
If I could go back and give myself one piece of advice after all the times I’ve started and stopped exercising, it would be to stop trying to do everything perfectly.
The routines I’ve abandoned have usually been the ambitious ones. The ones that demanded too much time, relied on me being motivated every day or were entirely focused on changing my weight as quickly as possible.
A sustainable exercise routine looks much less exciting. You find something you don’t hate, decide when you’re realistically going to do it and start with an amount that feels achievable. Some weeks you’ll do more. Occasionally you’ll do less. Sometimes life will interrupt it completely and you’ll need to find your way back.
That doesn’t mean you failed.
For me, being consistent with exercise isn’t about reaching the point where you never miss another workout. It’s about reaching the point where missing one doesn’t make you give up altogether.
And if you’ve spent years believing you’re someone who simply can’t stick to exercise, perhaps that’s the first thing worth changing.
Not your body.
Your plan.
Sources and further reading
Here are some NHS guides you may find helpful.
- NHS – Exercise — NHS information about exercise, physical activity and ways to become more active.
- NHS Better Health – Get active — practical advice and ideas for fitting more movement into everyday life.
- NHS – Physical activity guidelines for adults aged 19–64 — current UK recommendations for aerobic and strengthening activity.
A note about exercise: This article contains general information rather than individual medical advice. If you have a medical condition, injury, significant mobility difficulties or symptoms that make you unsure whether an activity is appropriate for you, speak to an appropriate healthcare professional.
