Beginner’s Guide: 3 Unique Ways to Enjoy Working Out

Ever wondered why some people love to exercise? It’s simple. They only do what they want to do.

“I achieve [happiness] through workouts. I believe that’s one unknown fact amongst those who wish to workout but haven’t yet: working out is very much like playing on a playground. Getting started requires doing what you want to do, and not doing what you don’t want to do.”
By Author, Response to this article published by Sowmya Sridhar

I was a fat kid. I was fat, had zero body confidence, and had little to no aspirations for much of anything in my life. The once exception: fitness. I always wanted to be fit.

When I approached High School, I hit a massive growth spurt and all of my body fat was stretched out. I was no longer fat, I was now lanky and awkward.

Yayyy.

I had always played baseball, so I naturally applied for the school’s baseball team and was promptly rejected due to my lack of athleticism. Ouch.

Things changed when I got to college, and I finally found my love for fitness.

My love for fitness can be broken down into five simple aspects:

The Clothes

Ever gone to the gym and wondered why everyone is dressed up? It’s simple: wearing cool gym clothes makes the experience fun. It’s part of the reason why I keep heading back. When I order a new pair of pants or a cool new shirt, I am immediately excited to wear it to the gym. It makes me feel like an athlete.

Additionally, once you’ve been going to the gym regularly for at least a month, your results become amplified by the clothes you wear. It takes at least one month to get visible results and trust me, time flies. Then you get to throw on a new outfit designed specifically to make you look good in the gym, and voilà! Now you look like a million bucks (unless you’re like me and you shop at Walmart).

The Gym Atmosphere

The gym’s atmosphere is a massive deciding factor that determines the return rate of customers. For the first three years of my college experience, I lived in a dumpy apartment complex that happened to have an incredible gym.

The gym was huge with tall ceilings, massive windows with beautiful natural light flooding in from all directions, and moreover, women had an entirely separate area for their own workouts in an equally sized room connected by a common-room/hallway.

Directly outside of the gym, we had a great view of a stunningly beautiful pool/recreation area. The pool and gym area were so popular, that everyone on our street (known as 42nd Street — it’s a very popular area for young adults to live in my city) would commute from their apartments, blow past their own gyms, just to come to ours. Eventually, it got so bad that we had to place extra security measures such as scanning key cards on the entrance of our gym doors to reduce traffic.

The Visible Results

Okay, this one is a no-brainer. We all want to look good, and we all know that when we look good, we feel good. This is true. When your confidence rises as you progressively feel better about yourself, your mental health begins to improve as well.

The visible results do not come in an instant, but they do come soon enough. In a matter of weeks, you will feel different when you look at yourself. The moment I got home from my first workout as an adult, I immediately felt better about myself.

Your biggest enemy when pursuing a fit life will be yourself. It’ll be your physical and emotional limitations. This is why it is beneficial: you don’t just improve yourself physically, but your mental strength improves as well.

Working out is very doable if your body is able. The hardest factor to overcome is a factor that you needn’t worry yourself with. When you think of working out, what is it that displeases you? What motion is uncomfortable for you? Simply do not do this. Think about what you enjoy, what seems fun to you, and what muscles or areas of your body you would like to improve upon. This, and only this, you may do.

This is how you get hooked on going to the gym. You wear what you want, you love where you go, and most importantly, you only do what you want to do.