Ever since a nasty concussion stopped me playing rugby when I was 18, I struggled to exercise regularly. I tried plenty of workouts, dabbling in everything from CrossFit to Zumba. While some were more enjoyable than others, I hadn’t found a way to keep a consistent, disciplined regime without it feeling like a chore. I’m 28 now and work from home. My commute from bed to desk is 15 steps. Given the health risks of sedentary lifestyles, I had tried just about everything to break my lazy rut, and then something worked: watching television.
Well, OK, not just watching television like a modern Jim Royle, who reached Olympic levels in The Royle Family, but I imposed a rule: if I want to watch TV, I have to do so while sitting on my exercise bike (the one cardio exercise I can tolerate). The result? I’ve been cycling roughly six hours a week for months now. Generally, I watch a lot of sports: if there’s football, rugby, tennis, boxing, NFL or cricket on, I’ll watch it. So invariably through the year I find there’s roughly two hours of sport on three times a week I want to watch. By combining this with exercise, I find I am able to do so without feeling guilty.
Most of the sports I watch have intervals, so I tend to cycle moderately during the action and then start to pedal my way quickly through another Jamie Carragher tirade or some inane ad breaks. I usually burn about 500 calories during a two-hour session. Sometimes my drink of choice while I cycle might even be a non-alcoholic beer. Bliss.
I used to feel exercise was a waste of time, like being a hamster on a wheel, spinning and doing very little. But the benefits of consistent exercise have been pretty amazing for me. It has helped me to reach a level of fitness where I feel less anxious about going to the gym, but I also reap the mental health benefits of sticking to a routine and enjoying the aches days after I push myself a little harder than before (a masochistic hangover from my rugby days).
Sure, there are some days when staying on the bike is more of a slog than others, if there’s a particularly boring match on or the wifi decides to be dodgy. But by that point I’m already there and something in me decides I might as well keep going. It’s almost as though this hamster wheel now energises me instead of dragging me down.
More recently, I have found that passively exercising while actively doing something I enjoy is a wider magic formula. Listening to podcasts while I take my time doing various sets of weights is my latest endeavour. They say that incremental changes are the most effective, and building up an exercise regime by watching television has worked. It has helped me to feel happier and healthier.