Winnie Lim

I don’t know if people know this, but I used to be extremely sedentary and I hated any form of physical activity. Only upon hindsight I realised it was probably related to a combination of factors which included adhd, depression and diet. Back then, I didn’t know that activity breeds energy. So the less active I was, the less energy I had, the more I didn’t want to move, becoming a downward spiral. 

Maybe it wasn’t so surprising that I got chronically ill. I only started to exercise because I felt like I had exhausted every other means to get better. Imagine not exercising for my entire life and then only getting into it as a 30ish year old. I had many stops and starts throughout the last decade or so, and only in the recent 1-2 years I am at a point where I can’t imagine not exercising because I have now experienced what it is like to have a moderately functional body.

I had made many mistakes along the way, so I thought I could share some thoughts on what I would have done instead if I was starting from scratch:

[caveat: This post does not apply to people who are experiencing post-exertional malaise (PEM), because exercise can be harmful for them.]

baby steps go a long way

I tend to be an extreme person, but now I realised I was simply very dysregulated. Every time I started a new aspirational fitness routine I would be very “aspirational”. Instead of using a couch to running program, I would just head out of the house and run like I am racing for my life. I remember going out for one of those runs and getting so winded that I couldn’t catch my breath for a very long while. Didn’t warm up, didn’t know what electrolytes were, didn’t know anything about the aerobic system. The fatigue that came after was crushing and affected me for days. I didn’t run after that experience. I tried a few years later, the same thing happened and again I stopped. And when I stopped I didn’t just stop running, it just turned me off any other forms of exercise.

If I were to redo it all over again I would just start with walking. Like go outside and walk around my block for five minutes.

The first time I made a sustained effort towards running, I started at 1km. I probably should have done couch to 5k but I am not very good at following instructions (adhd) so thankfully after multiple false starts I learnt how to start small.

the importance of understanding our psychology

What I’ve learnt over the years is to see my brain as almost a separate entity. It is not me or my friend. It has its own needs, desires and mechanisms which have nothing to do with what I desire. Our brains really likes to feel rewarded and doesn’t like to suffer. This is not their fault but an outcome of evolution. Our brains like to make us feel good in order to make us do something more (like procreation), and it makes us feel bad so we don’t go out there and get killed (like touching an open flame).

So to make exercise a sustainable routine it has to feel rewarding, or else we simply won’t do it again. Motivation comes from hormones and neurotransmitters which comes from the brain feeling rewarded. This is not something we can control mentally with a thought, it has biological basis.

To make our brains feel rewarded we need to feel a sense of accomplishment. So start small like five minutes, and slowly increase the time. Give our selves a pat on the back even if it is five minutes, because what actually mattered was that we decided to do it, and we did it. Anything is better than nothing, even if we decided just to stand up for a second after a long sit. 

The key is to remember that we will only continue doing it if we feel rewarded. Don’t start using terms like grit, discipline and willpower to think of our selves. In my opinion this is setting our selves up for failure. We have to work with our brains, not against it. People don’t realise this, but there is a accumulated cost when we keep forcing our selves to do something. It will have a stressful hormonal effect on our nervous system, and one day without knowing why we may feel burnt out.

Each session should feel easy and manageable. It is important to avoid burnout because once we feel burnt out we’ll probably not return to it for a very long while, if ever. It can be very difficult to overcome our brain and body’s adverse reaction to the activity that caused our suffering.

do something fun

The easiest thing to do is to try to find something fun, like something we actually like to do and it wouldn’t feel like too much work to start. For some people this means rock climbing, surfing, cycling, roller-blading. Activities that are typically not regarded as exercise works too, like dancing, gardening, street photography. The goal is to simply be more active than we were, not to become an athlete. 

do something easy

The next easiest thing is to do something that wouldn’t require equipment and too much start up costs, like walking. 

If getting out is too difficult, try to walk-in-place while watching tv. My partner started doing this first and I really avoided it because I probably have adhd and walking-in-place feels so difficult. But I read some research that says even just a short 15 minute walk after a meal can improve glucose metabolism, so I started to walk-in-place too, especially if the weather got too hot for outdoor walks. 15 minutes felt like forever, but now I can walk 30 minutes without feeling too frustrated. Watching a compelling tv show can distract from the tedium of the walk.

If we’re out we go window shopping in an air-conditioned mall for at least 30 minutes. It doesn’t matter if it is slow as long as we keep moving. Every attempt to move matters.

recovery days and pacing

I used to be obsessive with daily streaks and once ran 60 days every day rain or shine or even when I had a migraine. Now I know that was dumb of me and I was lucky that I didn’t get injured or become more chronically ill than I was. Our body is not a machine and needs time to recover, especially if we are new to that particular activity. If we’re used to being sedentary, even a 15 minute walk could feel exhausting. 

For strength training the advice is to stop when we feel like that are a couple more lifts left in us. This is good advice for almost everything in life actually. Society likes to tell us we have to always try to go beyond our limits in order to grow, but this often does not take burnouts or injuries into account.

That is why in my opinion it is important to learn how to do something small and manageable consistently versus going all out for something and then never feel like doing it again. It is an important life skill, but I was never taught this.

If it becomes too fatiguing we will start dreading it. So we have to develop the intuition to pause when we are still feeling good. This is not easy to practice because naturally we want to continue doing something when we are doing it well. Perhaps the easier thing to do is just to set small time increments. From 5 minutes to 6. Once a week to twice. Something realistic and reasonable for our selves. Schedule recovery days, it is too late when you actually need one.

I also use hrv4training to tell me when I truly need to recover. Sometimes the body accumulates fatigue even if we do our best to avoid it. 

make it part of a routine

This is also part of understanding our psychology. As mentioned don’t rely on willpower or decisions to do something. It will gradually become easier if it is part of our day, like brushing our teeth. I go out for my exercise as part of my morning routine after I finish writing my morning pages. After meals if we are home we just automatically get up and walk 30 minutes in front of the tv. There is less of “do I want to”, but more of “this is something I do after I do this”. 

But it is important to develop the capacity to know when not to push our selves too hard. For me I didn’t use brute force to make myself do any of those things, but they gradually became something I wanted to do because of the benefits they bring. But even if I wanted to do them, there can still be considerable inertia. Making it part of my routine takes away the decision paralysis. 

learn the science of the activity

It took me several attempts to run, and I only started to enjoy it when I discovered zone 2 running. I didn’t know running is something that can be enjoyed, and I didn’t know I could be someone who can enjoy running.

Through learning more about the aerobic and anaerobic systems I realised it was not a good idea to run all out at the get go for the entire run. Since my fitness was so bad when I started I couldn’t run all the way, so I was accidentally doing intervals. Later I tried to run continuously for as fast as possible, and it was a torture. I wasn’t training my aerobic endurance, I was training my mental endurance – to not give into the discomfort. I didn’t know there is a health cost to running at such high intensity continuously, especially for new runners.

But now I’ve learnt to run slowly, and running has become more effortless, meditative and enjoyable. I don’t care about setting PRs (personal records), I only care about improving my aerobic fitness (because aerobic exercise breeds mitochondria which breeds energy).

So there is value in learning about the science behind the exercise, instead of training blindly. 

involve other people

I don’t like group activities, but I can see that it can be a powerful motivator for some people. Join group activities if it is an incentive to make our selves more active. The socialising that comes along the way can be fun and engaging (definitely not for me). Some people like park runs, social dancing, gym classes (do consider some level of covid cautiousness like wearing a mask if the environment is not well ventilated). In Singapore there are free exercise classes in public community spaces (here’s also a list of other free stuff for singaporeans). If money is not an issue, something like classpass can be fun to try everything under the sun. 

Once as an unfit person, I went for a free event that guided us to walk 30+km across the length of Singapore. It hurt me for days after, but it became a lifelong cherished memory with my close friend. Now almost a decade later, I can go, “do you remember that crazy time we walked 30km+ in the hot sun” with her. Another time, I went for a herp walk with another friend. Again it hurt me for days – these events remind me how unfit I used to be and how far I’ve come along – but I got to learn a plethora of new things about Singapore’s reptiles and in the process I got to meet some amazing people. I am not social anymore now but I cherish these memories. I didn’t go for these things because I was interested in them, but I wanted to hang out with my friends.

I did however, get a personal trainer when I started strength-training. It was only 3 sessions but I experienced enough to gather the courage to continue on my own. Getting trainers is something people can consider if costs are not an issue. For some people it is just easier to follow along.

why I wrote this

Honestly, I thought this would be a short easy post with bullet points, something easy for me to write on a psychologically difficult week. But here I go again, writing this longwinded post with 2000ish words. 

I had the idea to write this while on my run – running often gives me time to think because it is one of the rare times I am not facing a screen – I was thinking how enjoyable and important running is to me now, and I had this flashback when I used to really hate it because it felt so bad. Then I had a series of flashbacks to the days when I really avoided moving. Not only did I not exercise, but I avoided anything that requires physical energy. My past self would not believe that my current self would exist some day. 

I only started exercising regularly around age 35 (am 43 as of writing this), prompted by my unceasing migraines. It was not an easy journey, but I feel like it could have been made way easier if I knew what I know now.

Exercise has become such an important part of my life. Without it I may not have kept my health and sanity. This is also one of the biggest reasons why I remain covid cautious: my only infection last year derailed so much of my fitness and gave me glimpse of what it would have been like with long covid because I experienced high heart rate with just minimal exertion for a long while (it still happens when I am too stressed). I cannot imagine not being able to run or lift weights, especially when so much of the world is depressing. It is the only time of my day when I can mentally chill a bit and take a break from the prison of my own mind.

Maybe one person out there may be like my past self, believing that it is too daunting to start. That it seems like this huge leap to make. Or they are always seeing the already-fit people tolling the virtues of exercise when exercising was not an issue for them to begin with. So I am writing this from the experience of a former very sedentary always tired person. 

I am not saying “you can do this because I can” because I truly dislike that since every one has different circumstances and baselines; I am saying if you have the idea to start, these may help. 

A lot of these may seem obvious, but it certainly wasn’t obvious to me, and I could have shortened my journey quite a bit if I knew these before I started.

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