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?
If you do it enough, yes.
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.
Most people with ADHD have brains that are diametrically opposed to habit forming. Every single task that I do every day is performed deliberately.
But how did you get to that point? Weeks of grinding out the task? Reminders? Alarms?
When I had kids I decided that I was going to live a healthy lifestyle to serve as a good example for them. Finding ways to exercise with them has been a lot of fun and then it just snowballed into me exercising on a very regular schedule and now I’m in the best shape of my life. Now it feels really weird if I have a day where I’m not doing some kind of exercise activity.
The same way you build any habit. The last two can be helpful but the first is the only essential piece. You make yourself do whatever it is you’re trying to start doing until it feels weird to not do it.
Are you aware of what sublemmy you are in, lol? Or are you some kind of magical adhd-er who can actually form habits like neurotypical people do? If so, I am so, so very jealous
Oh I’m aware. Still, it’s not a complex process conceptually. It’s certainly more difficult to actually do than it is to outline but that’s true for a ton of things. ADHD will make things harder to implement but it doesn’t fundamentally alter the formula.
For me I can’t really exercise for exercise sake. I have to do an activity that happens to involve exercise, like a sport, swimming, or hiking.
Things I have tried and enjoyed:
- net sports like badminton and volleyball
- trampoline park
- a martial art
- roller skating/blading at a rink, similarly ice skating
- a hobby that involves having to hike, brain want hobby reward so will put up with endless trudging…barely
- swimming / surfing / snorkeling / diving
- VR games (fr, quite the workout)
- having a dog and using dog as motivation to walk more
- amusement park or fair (because I will get my damn money’s worth and walk for like 10 hours straight)
Extreme social anxiety, covid, money, and no longer being in college with “free” or cheap access to things have ruined most of these for me but my point was to do a THING that happens to need you to move your body. Not just exercise (bleh). This is how you trick your traitorous brain.
This is totally it.
I don’t exercise I put the three kids in a truck tyre and drag them to school. (MUSH Daddy!)
I don’t exercise I walk to shop for milk, get home, realise I forgot the damn bread, think I can make bread, look up how, get distracted, make healthly wraps for lunch.
I don’t exercise, I just lose the thing I just put down, queue marathon of reorganization (it’s not cleaning) until I get the point of lifting heavy machinery to look under and give up, hammer on a worn 3/8 socket. Bonus cardio if the 10mm was in your other pocket all along.
I’ve found success with HIIT type exercises because you’re switching your motion every minute with rest in between. It’s easy to stay focused because of the variety and how quickly it changes.
Run directly away from home, when you get bored, you’re 50% done. Run home if you want it to be over faster
“You’re not going for a run, you’re just running away!”
- My wife when I do this.
VR hands down.
It’s the only workout that has ever stuck for me, because it really doesn’t even feel like a workout. Games like Beat Saber or Pistol Whip can burn as many calories per hour as playing tennis, and are genuinely super fun.
https://vrhealth.institute/portfolio/beat-saber/ https://vrhealth.institute/portfolio/pistol-whip/
I started playing regularly at the beginning of lockdown and ended up losing around 50lbs. I would play Pistol Whip until I was completely drenched and could barely stand anymore, but I still wanted to keep playing! I got a plugin for the valve index that measures your activity and your calories burned, and I can easily burn 1200 calories during a session… YMMV though.
Oh man, I did the same thing with DDR in the early 00s.
Amphetamines
Have you tried rock climbing? I have some friends with ADHD who really took to it.
Agreed, best shape of my life was when I took a rock climbing class… And now I haven’t excersised in years.
Bouldering was the first form of exercise that I’ve ever enjoyed
Same, it’s sad I live an hour+ away from the gym tho, otherwise I would do it so much
An actual bicycle. Constant change of scenery and not getting hit by cars really keeps me engaged.
100% this. Biking is such a game changer. I’ve never enjoyed any physical fitness effort as much as I enjoy biking. Running hurts too much for me to enjoy it but point is, doing something outside with changing scenery keeps me in the zone. Plus if I ride out 10 miles and get bored, I have to ride 10 miles back home.
I’d also recommend group fitness classes. If there’s an instructor telling me what to do, rather than me trying to self-motivate, I work out much more effectively and enjoy it more.
I got really caught up in the “make number bigger” cycle of lifting, and each 5lbs I added to any lift was a huge dopamine spike. Obviously you can’t keep increasing weight forever, but I found that the steady and easy dopamine hits from noob gains were enough to establish it as a habit in spite of my attention span
Bouldering was a breakthrough for me. I didn’t like top rope climbing because climbing just felt like an endurance test (admittedly, I was not climbing well) and I found belaying both boring and extremely stressful.
But bouldering feels like solving a puzzle and is something I can do both by myself and socially.
i love bouldering except that it destroys what fingerprints i have and locks me out of every biometric device i own LOL
Personally I hated team sports and things like going to the gym, but bouldering is really fun for me. It doesn’t feel like it’s forced or repetitive and you can choose what you want to do and it feels more live solving puzzles than sport. Am only a 5A+ so far but having fun.
What also helps is the atmosphere is very chill in the boulder gyms near me.
Great suggestion. I hate lifting weights, but bouldering is a ton of fun. Any sport sport that’s physical is honestly a good idea. Doing something fun for exercise is like eating those limon hot Cheetos, you don’t actually feel the burn until you stop.
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.
Other than medication, the only thing that works for me is going consistently with someone else. Playing games like tennis or racket ball also keeps my brain from giving up. Indoor bouldering where I can make progress on smaller routes can keep me from losing motivation or getting bored, 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.
