Exercise is hitting. My brain gives up way before my body does. Even when I try and listen to music or watch shows while exercising, I just can’t keep at it.
Has anyone found an ADHD friendly way to exercise?
Does running up and down the stairs repeatedly because I keep forgetting things upstairs count?
As with many things, it didn’t stick for me until it did and once I was in the habit, it’s actually harder to skip than to just go. Even if I’m not thrilled about the workout, I still end up going because it’s wired in now.
That said, I do listen to podcasts almost exclusively at the gym and that can make it kinda exciting if there’s a good one coming up.
Run directly away from home, when you get bored, you’re 50% done. Run home if you want it to be over faster
I have to do something more fun, i cant do cardio or weights no matter what i watch or listen to. Dance and martial arts are super engaging.
Heavy lifting is the only thing that’s stuck for the way my brain works. I used a program called 5x5:
- only 5 different lifts to learn, each full body so there’s no fiddly minmaxing
- more or less timeboxed. 5 sets of 5 reps 3 times with about a minute between each rep and set. To improve, you add more weight, not spend more time
- consistent, once you get the routine down, and you know roughly how long it’ll take, you can just let your body take over, coast on muscle memory and motor neurons, zone back in in an hour when you’re done
- numeric satisfaction as your weights increase in fixed increments.
- immediate gratification because functional strength is neat and comes on surprisingly fast
Downside: So hungry, all the time.
It’s been a few years since I’ve been active. I used to live in an apartment directly above a gym. Now I live in the boonies and need to convert my carport into a garage before I can buy a weight set.
I feel you. I am like this with so many things.
When I started going to the gym, the only way I could get myself to go was to watch a show on my phone while working out. The catch is, I told myself I was only allowed to watch the show while I was working out. If I want to know what happens next, I had to get on a treadmill.
I fell out of the habit last summer and getting back into it has been a huge struggle.
This works as long as the show dopamine is higher than the difficulty getting to the gym. Very few shows hold my interest THAT much past the first couple seasons.
When I was in college (a few decades ago), I was quite athletic, but once, I participated in a little marathon. 20 minutes in, I realized this was dumb & just walked back to the starting point. I still remember my thoughts - like why am I chugging along, rattling my entire being, & for what purpose, it’s just boring & pointless. I think with ADHD, we’re always calculating effort applied & reward received, & exercise is hard to justify. I haven’t run for fun ever.
Yeah, this is why it’s important to try and break down large goals into smaller goals. (I’m not saying it’s easy though)
Look at building muscle for example. What you need to do is focus on the little improvements, one extra rep each week, one extra pound each week. Make that your goal every single workout, instead of beating yourself up over the fact that you don’t look like 5x Mr Olympia Chris Bumstead yet.
(Which you won’t anyway, but that’s another story)We want short-term success, instant gratification, but excercising for improving our health is a long-term project, whichever way you do it.
So you need to train in a way that gives you these smaller achievements sprinkled throughout the weeks, months and years.
How though, that’s highly individual and depends on the person.
The only long term one I’ve been able to cope with is biking. About a 40km to 65km bike ride over a day. I was able to keep my speed to either hyped up music or slowed down music to keep my speed and I felt like I was doing something, not just standing in a room and the constant looming feeling of not making progress.
The other one I’ve tried lately has been badminton. It can be nice and competitive as well as friendly too!
Whenever I fall out of my exercise routine, I rebuild it in small chunks. At my peak, I was waking up at 4a, walking to the gym, doing 60+ minutes of weight lifting, 30+ minutes of cardio, then walking back home.
So, when I’m starting from zero again, my first goal is just to walk to the gym and back each day. I don’t even go in, I just force myself to get up (probably not quite as early), and go through the motions of walking there and back.
Once I have that down, I start trying to get myself up a little earlier so that I can go in the gym and actually do something. That something should initially still be something easy, so it might just be walking on the treadmill for 15 minutes before heading back home. Every day/week, I try to increase the duration/intensity until I get back to my ideal routine.
Some days I have a serious case of the "I don’t wanna"s, and on those days, I tell myself that I just need to walk there, and if once I’m there I still want nothing to do with it, I can leave, but I usually end up staying for most to all of my typical routine.I find that setting myself small, incremental goals is way more effective than setting one big goal, because with one big goal, if I can’t do the whole thing, then I failed, so why do anything at all?
Once I get into the routine, I find that it really helps me in so many ways, and definitely helps my ADHD. I really like morning workouts, but my friend does much better with evening workouts. Try different times of day to see what works best for you.
I did swimming for a few years when I was living close to a big swim hall and passed right by it on my way home from work. It does require a bit of motivation to start, but for me when I first got into the water it felt natural to just keep moving. Swam for 30~40 min and then going to sauna for 15 min and a nice hot shower afterwards was such a reward for my brain it always felt worth it. Now I moved and is sad I don’t live close to one. Also as got super tired afterwards but in a nice way. Felt good. I wasn’t medicated back then let alone knowing anything about ADHD so in hindsight, with medication I might have better odds of feeling even better after a good swim.
Swimming is the easiest for me to do - I find the rhythm soothing and I like being away from any technology so I can just think or focus on the swimming.
That could be one of the good reasons it worked so well for me. No chance of distractions from phone, TV, birds, houses people, sounds etc. Just the rhythm of the water and straight forward task. Also I’m thinking that it almost requires more brain effort to stop because of the whole changing clothes and shower process so to avoid that task i just stay in the water a bit longer. And the heat from the sauna is good at “melting my brain” so my thoughts get calmed down a bit and feels rewarding.
