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DataPacRat comments on How to become a PC? - Less Wrong
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First, I concur with /u/maia's suggestion: Find a partner. (Categorize that under "Shame," because you will be ashamed to quit when someone else is looking. Or file it under "Fun," because it can be a lot of fun to exercise with others.)
Second, you may also want to pay attention to the unspoken, automatic thoughts you have when you are losing motivation. Try to articulate them in sentence form so they can be interrogated. (For example, one might be something like "I'm never going to make any real progress" or "I'll always be a quitter.") Having identified a few, think up a good response sentence (e.g., "I won't make immediate progress, but I never expected to. If I keep working at it every day, including today, I will almost certainly be pleased with the results" or "Just because I've quit a lot in the past is no proof that I must always quit" or "Only the final attempt at habit-forming is ever successful, so it's natural that the losses outnumber the wins. No need to get down because of them, but I still want this attempt to be the winner, so I'll work at it again today.") Write down the response sentences on index cards, memorize them, and repeat them to yourself often (and especially when you sense your motivation slipping.) See if that's helpful, and do report back.
(These come from my understanding of cognitive behavioral therapy.)
As best as I can recall, they're roughly along the lines of "This is gonna hurt" or "Ow" or "Yep, that was painful". (Mostly during push-ups and planks.)
(Though at one point, I wondered if I could make a Super-Happy's head explode by presenting them with the idea that I was deliberately and voluntarily choosing to engage in an activity that caused me pain...)
There doesn't seem to be much there to respond to, other than whatever motivations I can convince my brain to believe that the eventual rewards are worth the present-day pain.
If it hurts consider that you might be doing something wrong. If it's just the burning sensation, although this sensation is usually followed by a rewarding endorphin rush, consider that you might not have to strain yourself that much to get the most important benefits from the exercise. I exercise regularly, make progress, and it almost never hurts. If you do bodyweight exercises for example, you don't have to exercise to the point of failure to make progress, in fact that might even slow your recovery.
I'm not having any problems with jumping jacks, toe-touches, squats, or sit-ups, and if that sort of thing was all I was doing, I think I'd have few-to-no problems with keeping myself on the routine of doing them.
The first day I started this 'get up and go' thing, I did one push-up; the next day, two; the next day, three; and so on. I'm currently in the twenties. I'm reasonably sure that what I'm experiencing is the 'burning sensation' you mention, though I'm not getting any sort of endorphin rush from it. And on the plus side, I actually /can/ do twenty-odd push-ups now, which I wouldn't have been able to when I started. (I know what that says about my physical state when I started.)
I've skimmed what free manuals and guides I can find, watched a few Youtube videos, and so on; short of buying a gym membership for professional advice, I think I'm doing things as closely to 'right' as I can manage. It just hurts, each day that I do n+1 push-ups compared to the previous day's n. (And, similarly, for holding the plank position for a couple seconds longer.)
Have you you tried doing shorter sets like 5x10 push ups with a minute of rest in between for example? You'll get much more push ups done this way, will progress faster and experience less burn. Try adding 1-2 push ups to those five sets every time you do push ups. If you reach failure point at any time, you're doing too many of them. Doing them every day might get counterproductive at some point, your muscles need rest to grow stronger. If you're already in pain when you're starting, you haven't recovered from the previous exercise.
Today's magic number was 25. (I started a few days after New Year's.) 5x10 push ups seems rather out of my range just yet - but 5x5 was a massive improvement, pain-wise, over 1x25. My main thought at the end of those: "Oh, if /that's/ all it's going to hurt from now on, this is going to be /easy/..."
So even if no other suggestion helps much - this one particular comment could make the difference. I'd up-vote it more than once, if I could. :)
Glad to hear I could be of help.
There's no reason why you shouldn't apply this to your other exercises too if you want to progress faster and less painfully. You might want to experiment with the number of sets to see what works best for you or vary the figure simply to make things a bit less monotonic. It's still nice to have "challenge days" every once in a while to see how awesomely many repetitions you can do at once.
I'm going from many years of no physically-demanding exercise at all to getting close to 30 of many of the basic exercises - so far, /every/ day is a 'challenge' day for me. But I'm getting better. :)
I'm feeling quite cheery today - today's routine was as non-excruciating as yesterday's, so it seems the modification's a definite success. Which means the choice between 'avoid eventual decrepitude' and 'avoid immediate pain' has tilted decisively in favor of the former. ;)
I'm just about to crash for the night; but I can answer that no, I've simply been increasing the number of push-ups, with at most a few seconds break between some of them so that I can keep going. I'm not in any pain when I start each day. (And any further replies will have to wait for the morn.)
I'm not a therapist or an expert, but I think you need to dig deeper. Why are those thoughts coming up, of all the (true) thoughts you could be thinking? I would guess that there are supplementary thoughts to those, ones that magnify or exaggerate them, like "This is going to be too painful" or "That was unbearable."
What sets those latter two thoughts apart is that they imply that the pain is somehow excessive, which (if true) would justify stopping. But whether the pain is "excessive" is kind of fudgeable by whichever side of your mind wants to quit. (Of course there is such a thing as excessive pain, and pain could be a legit sign of a problem, as /u/memoridem has pointed out.) If thoughts like these are underlying and giving strength to your urge to stop, try to figure out what exactly you mean by "too much" and see if the "too much" claim is really true. Then if it's not true, formulate a response to memorize.
At a guess, it could simply be because pain /hurts/, and I live a comfortable enough life that before I started this exercising thing, I haven't had to worry about anything worse than a headache or cat-scratch or the like for years. The other day, when I was doing 24 push-ups in a row instead of 5 groups of 5ish, by the time I hit the last one, I'd call the pain level at least on the order of magnitude of the migraines I used to get or the time I got a nice hospital-visit-requiring scalding, but fortunately fading away a lot quicker. I simply wasn't looking forward to inflicting that upon myself each day, every day, for the rest of my life as I maintained my health. (Or, put another way, to stick my hand into the gom jabbar daily without even a knife being held to my throat.) If that was what it was going to take, then I was willing to try, even if it involved applying some of the Dark Arts to my own mind to make it seem worthwhile...
... But if tomorrow's modified exercise routine goes as well as today's did, then I might not need to go to such extreme motivational measures. In which case my having started this thread will turn out to be more than worthwhile, at least to me, even if the response that did the trick didn't actually have anything to do with LW-style rationality itself. :)
Well, if you do any exercise from a relatively untrained state, some muscles are going to cramp up which hurts like hell but after doing exercises for a bit of time that problem goes away. I think it's only the increases in the exercise level that are painful, in the long term you'd feel as much pain from regular exercise as you would otherwise from just moving around as usual.
Well, I hope it does go as well, or better.