How I made the change from hating exercise to loving it

In my social media profiles I say “Wife since 2001, vegetarian since 2018, exercising since 2019, trying to be a good person since 1977”. It’s not an exaggeration when I say I only started exercising in 2019. February 2019 to be exact. I’m 42 and I can honestly count on my fingers the amount of times I’ve been able to keep up an exercise routine for more than a week, and even then I only kept it up for 2 weeks, I hated every second and I looked for excuses to get out of it.

But that was then. Last week the unimaginable happened. I was invited to be an ambassador for Sworkit, my favourite at-home exercising app! To quote the email from Sworkit “Our team here at Sworkit HQ has noticed you. You’ve seriously been crushing your workouts – we see you with 105 workouts achieved.” Say what now?! Is this spam? Oh no, wait. Now I remember! For a second there I had just forgotten that I am no longer a hater of exercise.

So how do you go from hating exercise all your life to loving exercise so much that the people from your at-home workout app asks you to be an ambassador for them? You really truly want to change and then you take action to make it happen.

The old me

My journey to exercise has been long. No, that’s wrong. It wasn’t a journey so much as a broken down car sitting on a dirt road for 30 years.

The catalyst for me to say enough is enough and wanting to feel strong, lean & trim was two surgeries I had to my feet. I’m not going to bore you with the details, only that after each surgery, I was in a leg cast for 8 weeks, followed by crutches and wearing a boot for 4 weeks and then physiotherapy for 8 weeks. I went through this twice over a period of 1.5 years. My leg muscles became super weak (not that it was strong to start with) and I was at my heaviest around this time from the lack of movement and comfort eating. When I finally got the all clear from the surgeon I was ready to tone up and drop the weight. Only problem was that I truly hated exercise. In fact I got really pissed off (there is no other way to describe the feeling) when I had to force myself to exercise – even though everything in me really wanted to be toned and slim. I had an intense inner struggle between wanting to, and absolutely hating, exercise.

I couldn’t work out why my emotions kept overriding the very sensible desire to exercise. This inner struggle wasn’t a new thing though. I’ve struggled with that anger and hatred since High School. But this time I really, really wanted to get to the bottom of the problem and sort it out for good. That’s when the Universe sent me help in the form of a friend of a friend, who just happened to be a Rapid Transformational Therapy (“RTT“) therapist. Kim had recently completed her training in RTT and needed clients to practice on. It was a very easy decision for me to ask Kim to help me get to the bottom of my aversion to exercise.

(Looking back I do think that if I hadn’t asked her to help me, I would have found some other way to get to the root of my problem – be it a book, a magazine article, someone else crossing my path, a YouTube video or whatever. The point is, I WANTED to change, so I  was ready to jump when the opportunity presented itself.)

Rapid Transformational Therapy

My RTT session with Kim took place on Sunday 27 January 2019. With her guidance I remembered two events from High School and one from Primary School which lay the foundations for my hatred of exercise, my habit of looking for a way to avoid it and the anger I felt when I did any form of physical activity. I knew the RTT had worked the moment we ended the session.  Less than a week later, on Saturday 2 February 2019, I was in my first Pilates class at a studio near my home. I loved it and I knew I would continue to love it.

I was just so, so, so, happy to see that the anger and old habit of looking for excuses not to go a class, had totally disappeared. I was truly a changed person and had become the kind of person I had always wanted to be! 2 February 2019 was the first day of the New Me.

As required by RTT,  I  continued to listen to the daily affirmations for 21 days and I haven’t looked back since.  I did Pilates classes once a week, then upped it to twice a week. By April I was even doing Pilates in funky places like The Shard – the UK’s tallest building and I took Kim with me. (You can read about our day here.)

I wanted to do even more classes but at £11 a pop for floor work and £17 for reformer Pilates it was getting a bit pricey. That’s when I started to research at-home exercising apps and found Sworkit.

I started using Sworkit almost daily in June 2019 and 3 months later I was invited to be Sworkit Ambassador.

Turns out I have been on an exercising journey after all – albeit it only really picked up speed in 2019, but what a ride it has been!

So now you know my backstory – tomorrow I will tell you all about Sworkit.