While sorting through my notebooks, I found a reminder from the end of last year: I had meant to write a short reflection on fitness. I then proceeded not to write it until now. With less than four months left in this year, I figured I might as well finish one overdue piece instead of continuing to let it sit there.
A disclaimer: this is not an attempt to persuade anyone to work out
If someone genuinely dislikes exercise—or even feels immediate resistance whenever the topic comes up—it is usually very hard for them to begin unless something specific pushes them into it.
When I was studying for a personal trainer certification last year, a friend of mine, who had started and quit fitness routines over and over again, happily told me: once you learn how to be a coach, you’ll finally be able to guide me properly.
But after I finished the first section of the study materials, I decided to stop trying to convince her to work out at all. I switched to encouraging her to accept herself instead.
Part of the reason is that this kind of certification is also, in practice, an industry credential. The materials naturally discuss how to identify potential clients effectively. If someone wants to make a living as a trainer, their energy is limited, so of course they are more likely to focus on people who are already receptive to fitness—people who are easier to turn into long-term coaching clients. I was never planning to rely on it for income, but even so, I had already grown tired of watching this friend go through the same cycle every year: start, stop, start again, stop again.
So who is more likely to begin exercising and actually build it into a habit?
- People who already enjoy sports or training and get pleasure from it;
- People who do not especially enjoy it, but are disciplined enough to stick with it because they believe it benefits them;
- People who are neither of the above, but whose bodies have already started showing clear problems, warning signs, or symptoms.
I belong to the third group. Even after my body was clearly telling me something was off, I still struggled for years before I seriously tried exercising. Then I struggled for several more years before it became a habit. Only after that did I begin to feel some enjoyment in it, drifting somewhere between the first and second categories.
So if a person truly hates fitness, and their body is doing fine for the moment, there is no reason they must jump into it just because exercise has become fashionable.
Another disclaimer: this is my personal style of writing about fitness
When I write notes or summaries for people who are not especially familiar with the subject, I tend to follow a few principles:
- use as little jargon as possible;
- avoid adding to people’s anxiety;
- and, if possible, help them spend less money.
I hope the kind of reader who would want this sees fitness as one possible way to improve quality of life—not as an exam, not as a contest against other people, not as one more excuse to beat themselves up for failing to stick with something, and not as a new source of anxiety because they trained for a while and decided their posture, lines, shape, or progress were still “not good enough.”
Setting goals that make sense
One thing that has become very obvious in recent years is that modern people have access to so much information that it creates illusions. We start to think that everything we see is normal, universal, and reasonably attainable.
Fitness is one of the clearest examples. It is incredibly easy to open Bilibili or YouTube and see influencers or celebrity trainers with excellent physiques, then subconsciously assume that if you train seriously for three months, you should look like that too. I have even seen lifestyle accounts where, after someone starts working out, a crowd of people who do not exercise at all begin criticizing them: this posture is bad, that muscle line is off, they don’t look strong enough, and so on.
Most people are not very likely to end up looking like famous trainers or celebrities. Either you do not have their natural physical advantages, or you do not have enough time, or both.
A simple example: I am 10 centimeters shorter than one of my friends. Out of curiosity, we compared the proportions of our upper and lower bodies and discovered that basically all of that 10-centimeter difference was in my legs. I can only train from the body I actually have. I can build leg muscle, I can reduce leg circumference a bit, but I cannot realistically expect to train my way from a 5:5 proportion to a 4:6 one.
At this point, I think of fitness this way: invest a reasonable amount and get a healthier body with better energy, so daily life feels easier and freer. On top of that, I would like to improve muscle development, lower body fat somewhat, and increase my lean mass.
Because everyone starts from different conditions, it makes more sense to set a short-term goal that is achievable now, and a long-term goal that can be broken into milestones. For example, if someone currently has a BMI of 28 and wants to eventually reach 15% body fat, it is obviously easier to stay consistent if that long-term target is divided into smaller stages.
How to reduce the chance of getting injured
In theory, if you have already thought through the issues above, most people are less likely to get hurt. A major part of avoiding injury is understanding your own current condition.
A few days ago I posted something about this elsewhere, and I’ll repeat the idea here.
People often ask questions like: how deep should I squat, should my knees go past my toes, how far should I bend in this movement, how heavy should I lift for this arm exercise?
A numerical example is the easiest way to explain it. Suppose your normal average capacity is 60, and your limit is 90. If your goal is to improve that limit, the right way to train is not to keep recklessly charging at 90 or even 95. That is how people get injured. A better approach is to spend more time training at 70, 75, and 80. Once your sustainable average goes up, then you test whether your ceiling has risen too.
Now imagine someone else whose average is only 20 and whose limit is 40. Then naturally that person should be training at 25, 30, and 35—not seeing someone else casually doing 60, trying to jump straight to 60, and then spiraling into self-loathing about why they are so bad.
This is about fitness, but the logic applies to many other things too.
Of course, once you get into the finer details of training, there are more precise methods. The numbers above—20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80—are only examples. In real resistance training, there are more specific guidelines for weight percentages and set/rep schemes depending on whether you want to emphasize strength, endurance, or explosiveness. The point here is simply to give beginners a rough framework.
Years ago, when I was taking personal training sessions at a gym in Hangzhou, the coach there was also training two students from Zhejiang University. They got injured while participating in their university sports meet, but still came in that evening insisting on their private session and asking whether he could teach them exercises that would avoid the injured area. He basically lost his mind and sent them straight home.
In ordinary life, overworking ourselves is often hard to avoid. But in situations like that, there is really no need.
A related question people ask is whether they can exercise during their period. Some people feel perfectly fine and energetic—then of course they can. Some have such severe menstrual pain that they can barely function—then lying down is probably the better choice. In cases like this, listening to your own body is enough. Nobody is grading you.
What I may write about next
I have already rambled my way to nearly two thousand words, so I’ll stop here for now. Next time I’ll probably write about home workout recommendations, some nutrition-related thoughts, and a few fitness books and video channels I personally like.
And for the record, one related experience I do have is this:
- I self-studied and earned the ACE CPT certification.