Something that’s been on my mind a lot recently is enjoyment and exercise.

The general message is that you should enjoy exercise as a whole, but primarily to be consistent.

Whilst I do agree with this, I think the message has got slightly misconstrued and when people don’t feel euphoric and satisfied when their lungs are about to collapse, they think something’s wrong.

First things first, let’s define enjoyment:

Enjoyment is the state or process of taking pleasure in something

Note: state or process.

Enjoyment can come in many forms, instant, short term, long term. All the terms..

To make this easier to digest, I’m going to segregate a typical ‘session’ into 4 stages:

1. Pre-empting beginning your session, potential doubts and low level anxiety, scanning for reasons how you can delay till later [aka never], or the minority of the time: excitement and motivation to begin.
2. Session begins, things feel hard, more doubts, more angst, more resistance, adapting to the feeling of increased heart and breathing rate
3. Mid session, usually lost the negative thinking and more in the flow of what you’re doing, perhaps lost in music.
4. End of session, thank fuck I did that. Feelings of satisfaction, self achievement and potential euphoria.

Most people don’t particularly take pleasure in stage 1 or stage 2, or even 3; at least the majority of the time anyway.