Competitive athletes and recreational exercisers alike, nobody is immune to the mysterious fluctuations in how effortful it feels to start a workout.
It's a frustrating experience to want to engage in physical activity on a conscious level, but feeling like doing it would be an overwhelming amount of effort. When even the thought of it makes you feel heavy and it's the last thing you want to do right now, it can take quite a bit of will power to get on and do it anyway.
For some people this is an occasional occurrence, while for others it's a regular thing. Equally some of us will find we don't get going at all under these circumstances, whereas others will get going but the whole thing feels like drudgery. Either way, understanding more about why this happens can help us address it more directly and make sense of it in a way that is constructive.
When it comes to getting round to doing a workout or anything active, we make our decisions based on both conscious and unconscious evaluations of the activity in question. We have the conscious, reflective side of things where we explicitly consider what we think about the activity, and we also have an automatic, emotional form of processing that occurs beneath our awareness and leaves us with a kind of gut feeling, or even a strong emotion in some cases. These evaluations are based on a whole host of factors that we will discuss shortly, and there is a range of research out there illustrating how they make physical activity more or less appealing, i.e. they make us want to approach or avoid it.
But there has been less attention on the phenomenon of attraction to inactivity, which is different to simply avoiding an exercise activity because of negative associations with it - rather, it is about actively seeking reduction of energy expenditure. This extra angle can help us to further understand the fluctuations we may experience in our felt readiness to be active.
The Theory of Effort Minimization in Physical Activity (TEMPA) was recently put forward by Cheval and Boisgontier to address this imbalance in the scientific conversation. Whilst there are many benefits to be enjoyed through exercise, meaning at times we may feel motivated to be active, we have also evolved to minimise effort and pursue efficiency for energy conservation purposes. Clearly physical activity involves varying degrees of both physical and psychological effort, and TEMPA explains that this effort is processed at a cost. The perception of a cost triggers effort minimisation processes, so if we are to commit to being active in the face of these inclinations we need to somehow oppose them.
TEMPA suggests that we can end up with evaluations that support engagement in physical activity at the same time as evaluations that support effort minimisation due to perceived costs, as well as inclinations to simply avoid the physical activity in question. These evaluations are influenced by a mind-boggling number of physical and psychological factors. Past experiences with the activity in question are key, particularly how we interpreted them and how we felt at the time. These can be conflicting - we may have both positive and negative experiences with an activity which will lead to mixed feelings, and the sentiment that ultimately wins out will depend on the information most salient to you in your current situation and what your reflective process is like.
Then there are physiological factors such as our health, sleep status, recovery status, stress levels, physical and mental fatigue, fitness levels, hydration levels, not to mention various biochemical processes going on in our bodies that we can't possibly become aware of (and more...). All of these influence the perceived cost of effort, and all we need is a combination of these to be slightly off for physical activity to feel like a huge task or even completely out of the question.
Sometimes the culprits can be quite obvious when we step back - we are simply asking too much of ourselves given what else is going on. But we're often not too good at acknowledging this - we operate under the basic premise that what feels doable under "average" or normal circumstances should feel doable under all circumstances. For a select few this is the case, but not the majority. Often it isn't doable, or it is but with a different approach.
Interestingly, this can even hit people who generally feel very motivated and energetic around hard workouts - think competitive runners and triathletes who do twice-a-day training. Recent bouts of physical activity, particularly in the same day, can make us less inclined to do more. As the authors of the TEMPA model point out, with more energy expenditure comes a greater inclination to minimise effort. So this explains why some athletes may find that second session inexplicably challenging to initiate some days, even if the earlier session felt positive.
It's also useful to note that this doesn't just apply to exercise - every movement we make technically involves effort, meaning when we consider exercising it isn't just the potential effort there that is being assessed, but the effort of everything else as well.
The point of all this is that as humans we are far more complex than we realise or can even know, and there are unconscious, automatic influences on our decision-making that we do not choose. This is a particularly important message for those who are quick to jump to self-deprecating conclusions about why exercise often just feels too much. Too often we hear people conclude that they are lazy, unmotivated or just "bad" at dealing with physical effort. But this is an overly simplistic view, not to mention often unhelpful.
There are certainly individual differences in things like the extent to which we experience positive feelings through exercise or are attracted to things that involve mental effort, both of which will influence how we react to perceived effort. Equally, there are personality characteristics that can influence how we approach personal challenges and our motivational orientations. All of those are useful to explore to tailor and optimise your approach, making your workouts feel both doable and meaningful to you. But at the end of the day there are also biological factors at play that can work against us depending on the factors we discussed above.
So what we're saying is it's natural to find the perceived effort of being active varies. But if you consistently bump up against "this feels like too much effort", the cost as far as your entire system is concerned is considered too high, even if you can't find a conscious reason that is sufficiently convincing to you. Before jumping to the conclusion of "I just can't keep an exercise routine going" or "I'm just not good at motivating myself" etc., consider that there's a lot more for you to learn about yourself and your situation.
Chloe
Psychology of Movement
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