Login | September 29, 2026
A love-hate relationship with exercise
PETE GLADDEN
Published: September 28, 2026
So I have a personal training client who, no matter how much I pump her up to get motivated about her workouts, just doesn’t have the same enthusiastic relationship with exercise that I do.
But here she is entering her third year of training despite her rather contemptuous relationship with the whole concept of exercising.
Now the heartening component of all this is the fact that she’s fully committed to accepting her “fitness fate.”
For me, working with a client like this is quite different from working with most of my other clients, who by and large are tried and true athletes and exercise fanatics, all of whom require little in the way of motivation, lecturing and encouragement.
The only thing these exercise geeks require is a guiding hand in helping them to better achieve their goals while not ending up overtrained and/or injured.
So with that being said, I’d had several years to contemplate the factors that have flipped a switch in my exercise-hating client’s brain and subsequently convinced her to stick to a fitness program - a program that often elicits pain, sweat, time and money.
Thus, here are the three factors that I believe have motivated this individual to stay onboard the fitness bandwagon.
1) The first and most important factor that persuaded this individual to accept fitness as a lifestyle change was a heart attack at the age of 50.
Prior to that incident she was a smoker who didn’t do exercise, nor did she want to.
Consequently, two coronary artery stints later, along with a recommendation from her cardiologist to make some serious lifestyle changes, she decided to stop smoking, reexamine her diet and implement a fitness routine.
And this is where I came in.
We began with a bare-bones basic exercise program that included components of muscular strength, cardiorespiratory fitness and flexibility.
Machines were used for her strength exercises because they’re beginner friendly, a stationary spin bike was used for her cardio because it’s easy on the joints, and light stretching was incorporated at the end of each workout in order to improve here joint’s ranges of motion.
As time went on and she adapted to a routine, I’d challenge her with a slightly harder, slightly more complex routine.
Presently, as she’s entered into her third year of training we both joke about how basic her initial routine was compared to what she’s currently doing - which is some pretty challenging stuff.
All of which brings us to factor number two.
2) She simply feels better.
Mind you, she still hates the pain that’s involved in muscular strengthening exercises, the pain of going anaerobic on the spin bike and the pain in the rump of spending time going through a number of flexibility poses and exercises.
But she’s accepted that temporary one-hour of hell three times a week because she feels both physically and mentally fit.
Her muscles are stronger, her cardiorespiratory fitness is better than it’s been in decades, her flexibility allows her to better perform everyday tasks and her outlook on life is way more positive.
3) She’s seeing amazing changes with respect to her body morphology.
Her arms, shoulders and legs are getting leaner and more muscularly defined, she’s loosing body fat around the middle, her cloths are fitting differently and she’s lost significant pounds in overall bodyweight.
She simply feels better about herself from a visual perspective.
Now understand that to see the morphological changes that this individual now sees, well, this takes some time, many months actually.
But once you begin to see such results, that can be a very motivational reason to stay on the fitness bandwagon no matter how much you hate the actual process.
With all that being said, I know fully well that this individual will never become the fitness geek that myself, my close friends and colleagues and my athletic clients are.
And that’s totally cool with me because hate it or not fitness has most definitely made an amazingly wonderful impact on this woman’s life.
Today fitness is just as much a part of her life as tooth brushing, taking a shower, going to work, eating dinner and going to bed.
She’s accepted it as a necessary evil.
And I call that a win no matter how much she hates to exercise!