By Dina Aldabbagh

My question to you is: what will it take to get you to start exercising? Just to start. The goal is that exercise becomes a daily habit in your life. Once exercise is habitual for you, then you can start focusing on setting more specific goals, but in the beginning, what I really want for you is to just foster this habit. The keeping of a habit is easy, the breaking of a habit is the hardest part, and somewhere in the middle lies starting something new. Your first task is to figure out what will get you to start working out, and this typically erupts in ways unrelated to exercise.

For one man I heard of, his goal was solely to show up at the gym and leave. He did this for a number of days without expecting any exercise to happen, until he finally said to himself, “Well, I’m already here, so I may as well do something.” Thus began his exercise journey. What he needed was to get himself to the gym, the routine. While it’s true that everyone needs a routine in exercise, for many of us, there may be something more personal that’ll inspire exercise. This is where step one of your task comes into place. In order to know what it will take to get you to start, you need to know yourself a bit. Who are you? What drives you? What excites you? What inspires action in you? Melding who you want to become with the current version of yourself now is the key to getting change to come about in your life.

For me, the thing that excited me enough to get me started in my exercise journey over two years ago was nothing other than competition. I was on a family vacation and my dad and brother were partaking in an Apple watch fitness competition. Having one of my own, when I heard of this, I jumped to join in and compete with them as well. I was especially interested in competing with my dad as I’d never won against him in a past competition. It sounds absurd, considering that any 21 year old woman should be able to wipe the floor with a much older man in a fitness competition, but if you know how these Apple fitness competitions work, you get points for every calorie burned, minute exercised, and hours stood — capping the points that can be gained in a day at a certain number. Because I’d always been at university for our past competitions, my dad was able to commit more time to gain those points than I could, so this was my chance. I had no school, my summer classes were over, and I had nothing to do but spend time with my family on vacation — or so they thought. This competition shaped my entire trip as I completely committed to wiping the floor with my competition. Any opportunity I could take to burn some more calories, I took it. Swim in the pool instead of tan? Yes. Walk instead of taking the cart transportation? Yes. Water aerobics with the elderly women? Ab-solutely. I even danced in my room at the end of several nights to make sure I could cap out my points each day.

What really triggered a change in me was waking up early to go workout with my brother. I’d lifted before in high school, but at that point, it always felt like a bit of a chore. In an effort to take every opportunity to burn calories, I asked to join my brother for his morning lift. Once he told me to meet him at 6:30 am, I was a bit less inclined, but I didn’t shy away. I hadn’t done strength training in years, so I just followed whatever his sets were for the day, each instruction. I didn’t actually care about the strength training, I cared about burning calories so that I could win. Winning was the goal here, but something funny happened when I was there with my brother — I noticed how easy it actually was to complete these movements. I just push this bar up 12 times and then I get a break? It was a good 30 seconds to a minute of movement and then an equivalent amount of time for a break as my brother worked in. I was shocked at how easy it was, or, how easy it felt. It didn’t really feel like I was doing much. Maybe that’s because my why was strong enough, but it felt like a different experience than my high school self had. While burning over 1000 calories each day in order to cap out my points would’ve seemed extremely unrealistic to the Dina before this trip, I had the time there to break down my goal into smaller goals and achieve them over the course of a day. Burn this many calories in this lift, burn this many in this swim, burn this many dancing…it added up. I couldn’t believe how easy it was to compete, and how much fun I had. 

I won both one-week competitions we had, and while that feeling was obviously great, I got another surprise in what actually fulfilled me from this whole experience. It wasn’t me, a 21 year old woman, beating a 60 something year old man in a fitness competition, it was a fitness award I found out about as I achieved it: Longest Move Streak. I looked upon this reward and realized, I worked out for 14 days straight? Something unlocked within me, because when have I ever done that before? Never. But now I knew I could. 

After 18 days, I broke that streak, then started it back up, then broke it again, then when I began once more, I never broke it again. You see, that second time I broke it, I was short only 36 calories to meet my goal, which would have kept the streak going that day. I still vividly remember that moment laying in my bedroom in low light, in an apartment building with a gym downstairs, thinking that I was just too tired to get up from my bed. So I didn’t. After I broke it, over 36 calories, I put those 36 calories into perspective. I gave up on my winning streak over 10 minutes of doing any movement in order to burn those calories and meet the quota. That’s all it would have taken. 10 minutes to win. I was now long past the competition with my dad, this turned into a competition with myself. How long can you go, Dina? What will make you give up on yourself?

I never would have thought at that time in my life that a family vacation and my love for competition would have spiraled into a life of fitness as it has. And that’s because it wasn’t about fitness in the beginning, it was about winning. If you want to integrate fitness into your life, just think about who you are and really want to be at your core. I wanted to be a winner, and fitness was the way I was able to champion that identity on that particular family vacation. And in a sneaky way, fitness weaseled its way into my life and into my heart, and it never left. 

You need to find what you really care about at your core, and use that to be the thing to get you to start. For example, maybe you’re someone who really cares about fashion and has particularly always loved the “gym fit” aesthetic. There are individuals like myself who don’t prioritize fashion while working out, so it’s okay to work out in a t-shirt and yoga pants — whatever I can sweat and move in. However, if you love that aesthetic, and have the means, put on your cute fit and go. There’s no one size fits all. If what you need to start working out is to make it about living an aesthetic life, go do your thing. Even if you can just get your hands on one outfit that makes you feel pretty, invest in it, then wash it every day, and wear that same thing over and over again until you can get more. Meet yourself where you’re at; whatever it takes to get you started. 

Or perhaps you love the David Goggins motivation core and want to feel like that’s you too, so maybe what you need is to pretend like you’re making your own personal documentary. Get up and record yourself at 5 am, talk to the camera like there’s someone interviewing you. You may be someone who loves to document your life, so embody the fitness influencer identity and make a fitness instagram — post your workouts, your outfits of the day, your tips. Not that anyone is going to care, by the way. Your goal may actually be to become famous from this, but what I’m trying to get across is that this is for you. It’s for your own personal validation. No one actually cares that I have a fitness streak going. When they hear it, they may give an “Ooo,” but that is so fleeting, that it’s not what can keep me going, so it’s not what’s going to motivate me to show up every day. You videotaping your journey, making a fitness instagram, or wearing aesthetic outfits isn’t going to motivate you because other people love to see it, it’s going to motivate you because it feeds you. 

So, choose what feeds you. After a bit of self-exploration, figure out what things in life you do for fun and don’t need any motivation to get you to do. I don’t need motivation to want to win a competition, that’s just inside of me. What’s inside of you? Figure that out and you’ve found your secret weapon to get you to begin. You’ll be surprised when you begin your fitness journey out of a motivation that’s truly close to your heart, how committed you’ll become. Because, dear reader, we are meant to move our bodies. It is such a necessary part of being happy that once you begin, you’ll become addicted. 

Just find whatever ‘why’ you need to get you to start.