Why I Aim To Jog One Round, Not Three

I had set myself a goal to jog three rounds around my apartment. But, after I ran two, I was tired. I could have still used my willpower to finish the third round, but I chose to instead go home. Why? Because, if I push myself, the next time I consider jogging, I’ll subconsciously consider it a strenuous activity, one that requires a lot of effort and rest afterward, so I’ll put it off if I’m already tired. Tiredness is not always physical — sometimes we’re tired mentally and lacking in determination to push ourselves to do what’s right for us. Our mind makes all these decisions subconsciously — we don’t even know why we didn’t exercise today, just that we didn’t feel like it.

So I’ve set a goal for myself to jog just one round around the apartment. I’m trying to make it easy for to exercise, so that I exercise more often. With exercise, regularity matters more than duration.

Make something easy, and we do it more. Make something hard, and we do it less. This is a lesson platforms like Youtube use to manipulate us to watch yet another video, by making it auto-play, by making it the path of least resistance. Similarly, make exercise easy.

I’ve decided to ignore the conventional wisdom of setting a goal to jog one round, achieving it consistently, then increasing to two, achieving it consistently, then increasing to three, and so on.

James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, recommends an even easier goal than jogging one round: he recommends that your goal should be just to wear your running shoes.

In addition, I chose to jog, ignoring my coach’s advice to walk. Because jogging can be done in less time: if I jog for six minutes, I’ve had a workout, while I need to walk for 30 minutes to feel that way. And I don’t always have 30 minutes. If I’m about to have lunch, I can often squeeze in a six-minute jog, but not a 30-minute walk.

Exercise needs to fit in to our lives, and to adapt itself for that purpose. Our lives are not going to change to accommodate exercise. This is something that many people who devise exercise plans miss. They just plan exercise in a vacuum, forgetting that people have lives to live — they have to meet demands at work, take care of loved ones, and a lot more. People have tons of things to do, and exercise is at best the tenth priority [1]. So exercise coaches should make a customised plan that fits into our life, rather than the other way around. Financial advisors should make a financial plan that fits into a person’s life. Career coaches should make a career plan that works for the person and his circumstances. So, plan your exercise to make it easy for yourself to exercise, to eliminate every excuse you might have.

[1] Unless you’re planning to compete in the Olympics, but you aren’t.