Keep It Simple

I’ve had a few interesting conversations recently with people that have read Find Time for Exercise. When I’ve asked them for feedback, most of them have commented on how much they enjoyed the interviews with real-life people.

Reading stories from individuals they can relate to seems to have really hit the spot with my readers. This is great feedback because I wanted to include this middle section in the book when I started to write it but wasn’t sure if I could make it work. From what I’m hearing now, it has not only worked, but is proving to be very popular.

I’m deeply passionate about the subject of the book and spend a lot of time thinking about the issues and ideas that it raises. Having analysed why I think the section on “Other People and Their Challenges” has worked so well, I have come up with the conclusion that it appeals on three levels. It is a well-balanced mixture of being Emotional, Educational and Entertaining. The three E’s. That’s it.

I have often said that there is a line in the book, somewhere, that will leap out and grab any individual reading it. It will be a different line for every reader, but there is at least one line in there somewhere that will make you stop, think, mark the page and, hopefully, act upon it.

If one line in the book hooks a reader and changes their life, then I don’t mind if that line was written by me or came from one of my interviewees. It seems that for many readers, it is quite often a line from one of the real-life case studies that is triggering that stop-and-think moment.

The five chapters that I am referring to are numbers 12 to 16. In each of these chapters I interview two people that have increased their activity levels for one of the following five reasons:

·       Weight

·       Mental health

·       Physical health

·       Prevention

·       Fitness and strength

This section of the book provides a vital link between the earlier section where I describe my personal exercise challenge and the concluding call to action for the reader to come up with their own challenge.

In reading it back to myself recently there is one short passage in the Mental health chapter that keeps leaping out at me. It comes in the interview I recorded with Sam, a first-time mother who succumbed to post-natal depression following the birth of her daughter in 2016. When I asked her for her message to anyone that isn’t taking regular exercise, she had this to say:

“Keep it simple. I think when people think they need to exercise or do physical activity they kind of think too big. They think I need to do this massive challenge, or I need to do something to excess for it to be any good, and actually, you know what, planning a 20-minute walk on your lunch break, every day, that’s enough to get you going. It’s about finding something that hooks you, that motivates you.”

If you haven’t read the book yet, and I hope you will, then you might find a line that hooks you more than that one, but in the meantime, the reason for this article is to get you to think about what Sam said in those four sentences.

Helping you build more regular exercise into your life is what I’m aiming to do, and Sam’s advice that I’ve repeated above contains some very useful guidance. It is far better to keep it simple and build gradually, than to set out with a grand plan to make a massive step forward, only to find it too hard to keep up with your ambitious plans and end up back where you started within two or three weeks, as so often happens.

Then the final line from Sam, that I’ve quoted above is also worth thinking about. “It’s about finding something that hooks you, that motivates you.” Finding time for more exercise in your busy life is something that you probably want to achieve, but in order to be successful you need to find something that hooks and motivates you. You are probably aware of the health benefits of being more active, but without the motivation that comes with finding that hook, you are likely to lose interest and fail to make the breakthrough you might have hoped for.

The uplifting outcome of Sam’s story is that she found her hook in running. She started, as so many people do, with the Couch to 5K programme, then progressed to parkrun and then to running longer race distances. Her mental and physical health improved, and she bonded properly with her daughter. Her story is certainly emotional, and from a reader’s perspective it is also entertaining and educational.

The theme running through the book is encapsulated in those few short lines from Sam, and I am confident that if you read Find Time for Exercise, and think about applying the principles to your own situation, then you will be well on your way to finding the hook that motivates you.

Good luck and remember to keep it simple.

Find Time for Exercise - Available in paperback and eBook