The Intrinsic Exerciser: Discovering the Joy of Exercise - Softcover

Kimiecik, Jay C.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 061812490X ISBN 13: 9780618124909

Publisher: Harvest, 2002

Synopsis

Too many of us exercise to lose weight and stay fit. Jay Kimiecik believes that focusing on those reasons make sticking with a fitness plan almost impossible. With full appreciation of the real problems people have with exercising, he writes that we must instead find personal pleasure in any physical activity we choose. Kimiecik's infectious enthusiasm and easy four-step plan will turn anyone into an intrinsic exerciser for life.

About this title

About the Author

Along with his work at Miami University, Jay Kimiecik has written The Y Personal Fitness Program: 12 Weeks to a Better You, which is used in hundreds of YMCAs in North America. Jay is also the host of FitTalk, a radio show on fitness and exercise.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1
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Outside-In: The Extrinsic Approach to Exercise

Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
— George Bernard Shaw

By now you"ve heard or read most of the reasons that you should be
physically active. You know at some level that exercise is a great
way to lose weight. Exercise can also help you live longer as well as
reduce your risk of certain kinds of diseases, such as coronary
artery disease, obesity, diabetes, and osteoporosis. The complete
list of the benefits of exercise is longer than the ride lines at
Disney World.
So why are so few people exercising? Well, most folks say
they don"t have enough time, don"t know how, or that the effort is
too much. In fact, most people just don"t have the right mindset for
exercising because they"ve been brain-washed by what I call the
Outside-In approach to behavior change. For example, most of us focus
on exercise as a way to look good, be fit, or lose weight — ideas
that focus on the outcome of exercising. Therefore, they don"t have a
lot of motivational impact.
The Outside-In approach focuses on the logical and rational
reasons that you should exercise. Outside-In emphasizes things
outside yourself; the reasons and benefits of exercise come from
external sources, which lead us away from the exercise experience
itself. On the surface, the reasons are good. Who doesn"t want to
reduce the risk of coronary artery disease? Who doesn"t want to live
longer? Who doesn"t want to lose some weight? Ironically, the
onslaught of focusing on these external factors may even have the
reverse effect on people: they make us less likely to become regular
exercisers, which leads to more people being overweight and having a
greater risk of suffering diseases.
If the Outside-In approach worked, 98 percent of the people
who spend billions of dollars on weight loss products and programs
wouldn"t gain the weight back or add even more pounds within six
months to a year. And the number of obese people in the United States
wouldn"t have risen from 12 percent in 1991 to 18 percent in 1998,
resembling a communicable disease epidemic. The incidence of diabetes
would not have increased by 6 percent in 1999, which led the director
of the Centers for Disease Control, Jeffrey Koplan, to state, "This
dramatic new evidence signals the unfolding of an epidemic in the
United States." Approximately 300,000 Americans would not die
prematurely each year due to physical inactivity and poor nutrition.
The Outside-In approach to lifestyle change is literally a dead-end
street.
The effects of the Outside-In approach are summed up by a CDC
epidemiologist, Ali Mokdad: "The message is out there: lose weight by
increasing your physical activity and changing your diet. But nobody
is doing it." That"s because the message doesn"t connect with your
mind, heart, and soul. The Outside-In approach to behavior change has
no staying power. You don"t transform your thoughts and feelings to
make exercise an enjoyable and uplifting experience.

Why Outside-In Rules

Almost without your knowing it, Outside-In causes you to say things
to yourself such as "I know exercise is good for me. I should get out
there and do something." "Why can"t you get your lazy self over to
the gym, you good-for-nothing sloth." "I have to lose weight before
the summer so I can fit into my bathing suit." None of these
statements will motivate you to exercise regularly, but I hear people
say them all the time.
Without getting too bogged down in history and sociology, the
main point is that Outside-In dominates our behavior because of the
social, political, and economic structure of Western civilization.
The main words guiding this structure are rational and analytical. We
live in a society dominated by a rational view of life and people.
It"s no wonder, then, that our mind listens to and at some
level accepts much of the information about health and fitness
because it is based on research conducted from a rational, analytical
perspective. It"s everywhere — scientific journals, TV, magazines,
newspapers. Whenever something is made rational, such as health and
fitness, the focus is primarily on outcome: longevity, disease
reduction, weight loss, and fitness.
This logic points us to the future: if we do this, then that
should or will happen. Rationality focuses us on the desired products
of exercise, but it moves us further away from any awareness and
enjoyment of our exercise. The typical Outside-In approach completely
ignores the fact that exercise is an experience and that people can
be motivated — or not — by that experience.
Behavior change approaches such as educating yourself on the
benefits of exercise, motivating yourself with rewards and
incentives, and undergoing health screenings will largely fail. But
exercise scientists keep trying to convince you. In 1995 a group of
them published a host of physical activity guidelines in the Journal
of the American Medical Association. They state, "Successfully
changing our sedentary society into an active one will require
effective dissemination and acceptance of the message that moderate
physical activity confers health benefits." Although these guidelines
are well intended, they come from the Outside-In approach. As Ken
Goodrick, an associate professor at Baylor College of Medicine,
says, "We know that if everybody exercised a few hours a week, Type 2
diabetes would be virtually nonexistent. The trick is motivating
everyone to do it." There"s no trick, really. It"s just that as
humans our behavior is not always rational. Before my wife and I gave
up caffeine, there were times when we would drive the 45 minutes from
our town to Cincinnati just to buy a cup of a certain brand of
coffee. During the ride, we would tell each other how crazy we were
being. We could have easily bought coffee in our own community, but
the mental and emotional connection with the taste of the coffee
available in Cincinnati made us do something that on a rational level
seemed downright dumb. To change your behavior, you must tap into
this deeper mental, emotional, and spiritual connection — what we
sometimes call "irrational behavior." In essence, exercising
regularly is irrational, and those who do it did not come to it
solely by convincing themselves of all the wonderful, rational
benefits.

Are You Tired of Hearing How Good Exercise Is for You?

In fact, only about one of five people exercise regularly, even
though most people know about the health benefits of exercise and say
they want to exercise.
When people are continually bombarded with Outside-In
information, they begin to feel a helpless, mindless malaise toward
moving their body. Or they get so desperate to "repair the damage"
that they try things that are ineffective at best, unsafe at worst.
Why else would some people take a pill before going to bed thinking
that they will lose weight while they sleep? The Outside-In
informational approach scares people, but they don"t know how to find
the key to their own motivation. So they turn to things that are just
taking their money or feel guilty while doing nothing.
So don"t feel too bad if you haven"t been able to stay with a
fitness program that you tried to follow in your newspaper or
favorite magazine. Most of these approaches just spell out how to do
the physical parts of exercise. For example, an article in Cooking
Light magazine by Gin Miller, a fitness expert, laid out a 4-week
program that included cardiovascular, strength, and flexibility
components. She described how to do the exercises, when to do them,
and so on. From a fitness perspective, the program seemed reasonable.
Miller states, "The only thing you need to do is make time in your
schedule and lace up your sneakers." The problem is, that"s not the
only thing, it"s everything. You won"t adhere to this kind of program
without developing an inner reason for doing it. The how-to fitness
information is certainly important, but changing your mindset is more
important than any program. All programs begin and end, but your mind
keeps going, and you"ll need to change it if you want to keep moving
your body.
Many fitness experts and programs almost unwittingly set
people up for long-term failure. People already know the myriad
benefits of regular exercise, yet they still can"t motivate
themselves to get moving. A survey conducted by American Sports Data
tells us that 79 percent of the population already has a "highly
developed fitness consciousness." Yet most people still fail to work
exercise into their lives.
Even good exercise adherence programs tested by behavioral
scientists come up a little short. Rod Dishman and Janet Buckworth at
the University of Georgia analyzed the results of 127 studies
designed to increase people"s exercise behavior. People generally
reverted to their earlier behavior shortly after most of the studies
ended. Much of the scientific research has been successful only in
getting people to exercise during the intervention. But the
intervention has not been very effective in changing people"s
mindset. When typical Outside-In exercise programs are offered, 50 to
75 percent of the participants drop out within a few weeks or months.
Clearly, simply providing people with information doesn"t
work, and, in fact, overemphasizing the benefits of exercise can
produce strong feelings of guilt, anxiety, and frustration, which
result in even less motivation to exercise. Furthermore, people can
become so focused on these outcomes that they ignore the process of
developing positive, inner experiences with movement and exercise.
Telling people about all the benefits of exercise without
helping them change their mindset toward the exercise is like putting
children on a bike for the first time with no training wheels — they
will crash.

Two Motivations for Exercise
Outside-In Inside-Out
reduces disease risk feels good
controls weight enjoyable
future-oriented in the present

Outside-In doesn"t work. Becoming a regular exerciser has
very little to do with your belief in the message that physical
activity will enhance your long-term health. As you"ll see, many
people who do exercise regularly don"t exercise primarily for a
specific reason. It will take a lot more than your belief that
accumulating 30 minutes of moderate physical activity is good for you
to put in that time each day. Becoming a regular exerciser requires a
transformation from an Outside-In focus to an Inside-Out experience.
People who garden regularly don"t do it because they think it"s going
to reduce their risk of coronary artery disease. They garden because
they love the connection with the earth, the state of mind they enter
when surrounded by flowers and greenery, the feelings of
accomplishment derived from the aesthetics of the garden. These are
powerful, inner reasons for gardening. Approaching exercise from an
Inside-Out perspective will help you focus on the process and joy of
your experience. Once you open up to that joy of movement, you"ll
want to do it more frequently. And if your life is anything like
mine, you will need that inner force to inspire you to exercise while
living in a chaotic time.

I Can"t Exercise Because My Life Is Out of Control

Changes in family structure, advances in technology, and our work
habits make it even less likely that an Outside-In approach will help
people become regular exercisers. Women in particular face these
issues. For example, single-parent households have increased
significantly in the past 25 years, and most of these single parents
are women who work. For all women, the pressures of juggling work and
family are enormous.
More stress results from these changes, and stress has a
negative effect on exercise. Barbara Stetson and her colleagues at
the University of Louisville followed a group of women"s exercise
patterns for 8 weeks, examining their perceived stress each week and
how it related to their behavior. Their findings showed that even
minor stress, such as rushing to meet a deadline or completing
household chores, severely disrupted the women"s exercise patterns.
When the perceived stress was the highest, the frequency of the
women"s exercise was the lowest. The researchers also found that
under high stress, the women"s confidence to achieve their exercise
goal and enjoy exercise was diminished.
Suggesting that these women exercise for Outside-In reasons
does nothing to ease those pressures, and it certainly does little to
help them develop a passion or inner fire to move their bodies
regardless of the barriers — such as time pressure — to exercise.
Other changes in family life have also had a major impact on
people"s leisure time. In 1960, only 40 percent of mothers with
children from 6 to 17 were employed outside the home. By 1996, that
figure had risen to 77 percent. As William Haskell of the Stanford
University Center for Research in Disease Prevention points
out, "Within households, much more time is spent working to earn a
living in the 1990s than in the 1950s."
All of these changes have reduced people"s leisure time, not
increased it, as some experts projected in the 1960s. This makes it
more difficult for many people to perform healthy behaviors such as
exercise. As Haskell writes,

The expectation has been that we would be able to use new technology
to accomplish a similar amount of work in less time and therefore
increase the amount of leisure time available. Instead, we have used
new technology to do more work in a similar amount of time,
decreasing the amount of work-related physical activity but not
making any additional time available for leisure activities.

Simply put, work rules. The downsizing phenomenon of the
early 1990s left many people out of work. Many of them decided to
start their own small businesses rather than return to corporate
America. This is probably a good trend in the long run, but as anyone
running a small business knows, it takes uncountable hours of blood,
sweat, and tears. A national survey sponsored by Oxford Health Plans
found that one in six American workers does not use up his or her
annual vacation time due to job demands. What"s more, since 1980, the
number of workers who hold more than one job has risen by 54 percent.
There are hardly enough hours in the day to fit in exercise with one
job, let alone two.
The employees still in corporations now must do more with
less — the lean and mean approach. So they work 10 to 12 hours a day
instead of 8 or 9. And employers are reducing the average amount of
vacation time for their workers. Some people commute as many as 2
hours to and from work each day. Unless they exercise at work or in
place of lunch, when are they going to do it? Their commute can turn
a 9-hour workday into a 13-hour workday. This barely leaves enough
time at the end of the day to do anything but go to bed.
Paradoxically, the research on exercise in corporate settings
shows that employees who are fit are...

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvest
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 061812490X
• ISBN 13: 9780618124909
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176