You will certainly have heard of the benefits of exercise and workout. There are a lot. They stabilize your heart rate, give you a better sleep, assist you in your slimming effort, and so on, and then much more…

But that about the benefits of exercise is, actually, only half true. It is like putting the cart before the horse, like building a second floor without having yet built the foundation.

Can you answer where you can draw sustainable motivation from to go and sweat yourself over a long period of time? Oh, we hear too often about willpower and achievable targets. But I personally wonder how it is possible at all to get those things work. For me, none of these works.

When you are down, you need to move, to exercise, to workout in order – to get up again. But how is that possible at all? I think it can work only the other way round. Let’s put the cart behind the horse and, finally, see some progress! Let’s try to get up first, to get the desire, to start longing for that unmatched feel of moving, of being alive! And only then, let’s put on the trainers and hit the running track!

There are next to none resources out there delving into that. At least, I have poor success finding them. The link between the need and the ability gets lost again and again. You need to move, that’s rather clear. But how? 

That is why I had to accumulate the reasonable bits from many sources to be able to create my mental foundation, my driving force that will stand the test of challenges, the test of time.

But here I will speak only about what I found, and what works for me, walking the way from the specific to more general.

First off, there is joy in exercise, a strange joy that you feel when you work hard. Young children know about that joy, so they run, jump, climb, they move a lot. I use that joy for my own benefit.

The strange joy is my only and absolutely sufficient motivation for physical activities. I don’t have any health expectations or other goals whatsoever.

I am not strong. I do not have willpower. Well, I have only as much it and use only as much of it so as to keep all willpower out of my life.

I go out to run, and have been doing that for many years. All the persons of willpower here around have dropped it long since.
But the humble me, who does not have or use willpower, well, I turn out to be the consistent one and I continue doing that without being even close to quitting! And that’s not the only thing that I keep doing. I try to saturate my every free minute with moving. I squat, jump, do pushups and many other exercises. I do it in a free manner, often when others go for a smoke.

I have been asked how I cope with being watched and seen while I do funny things. But, hey, why should I feel embarrassed when those who smoke those don’t? If they don’t feel ashamed for their ritual of worshiping death, then why should I be? What wrong am I doing, after all? I do good, pleasant, cheerful, enjoyable things. I feel good right when I do.

Oftentimes, I see that some people get in a way “infected” with my example. They finish their smoking quicker than usual and try also to do some bending or stretching.
That is how doing the right thing ourselves, we encourage also others to do something good.

I move as much as it is possible for me being a computer man. When I run, I try to do also short bits of high or maximum speed. In pushups, I sometimes stay to the maximal count. I like it, I savor it. I feel immersed all in that strange joy that I am speaking of all the way. I have no other goal, nothing. Only the very joy of doing.

When you restore in yourself the ability to feel that strange joy that you were feeling once when you were a child, then you need no other thing to keep your motivation up. You will be even longing for your next workout session, for your next run on the stairs, for your next getting up from your chair and doing squats or boxing strikes.

But in order to be able to feel that great healing strange joy, you need the solid foundation. All the motivation, all the joy that you feel can stand only on the rock solid foundation of your personal integrity.

You won’t be able to feel the strange joy and benefit from it if there are things that compromise your integrity. If you hold grudge, if you don’t forgive, if you can’t accept your own self, if you own something that corrupts you, or other things of that kind, then you are out. No willpower will be helpful.

If you want to let the strange joy motivate you, encourage you, cheer you up and, ultimately, also improve your health, you need to restore your personal integrity.

Restoration of a person’s integrity can be a very individual thing. My own particular experience, I have described in my book Great Health By Decision, which is available both as a kindle book and paperback on Amazon marketplace.

Even though your integrity issues can be very different from mine, the book can give you ideas that help you to figure it out.