You may be a person who hates people watching them when they are working out.

You may hate to sweat and feel dirty.

You may be very inactive and the slightest exercise is very painful for you.

You may be very confused about how to use exercise equipment and find it all very intimidating.

You may have a fear of others looking down on you for being there.

You may find exercise boring.

Do you find exercise boring? Perhaps you’re the sort of person that needs a distraction when you exercise. Try reading the paper, a good book or even watching a movie on your iPad while ridding a stationary bike. The stationary bike might not take you to any place, but reading or watching a movie can be a great way to escape to another place.

Do you have a purpose? Having a task, event, or hobby that is connected to your exercise is a great way to stay motivated. Don’t just run on a treadmill, but run to the grocery store to buy one small item. Thinking of heading to the movies or the bookstore? Maybe you can ride your bike the next time.

Can you use exercise as a release from your day? I find that most people who are constantly bombarded with stress are also people who tend to be without a way to properly release this stress. Taking time out of your day for some “me time” is a great way to include activities like walking and stretching that will provide you with both calorie-burning activity and a way to release stress. This will only work if you prioritize this time and treat each session like any other important appointment in your day.

Are you rewarding your success? All too often I find that people who hate to exercise have a pattern of not rewarding themselves for their success. How do you “treat” yourself when you do well? Do you go for the chocolate? Chances are you don’t think of exercise as a reward or you would have been enjoining all the great “feel good” chemicals that come from completing a great workout on a consistent bases and have no need for this information. Your rewards will at first need to be more tangible items and be reestablished gifts to yourself for various benchmarks in your fitness journey. It will even work best if the gifts can be something that makes you feel good about yourself when you exercise. How would you feel to have a new pair of running shoes? Would you feel great in a new workout outfit? Perhaps a new gym bag would be a great gift.

Have you ever wanted to be “one of those people”? Sure you think they are crazy for all the running and all the time they spend training and eating the way they do. After all, how do they get this sort of energy? Is that just built differently you wonder? The fact remands that there is perhaps a small part of you that wonders if you could ever be the one that could run a 5k, run a 10k, or heck even run a marathon. What if every limiting belief, every reason you had for not doing it was gone? Would you be willing to learn what it would take to accomplish such a task? What if you learned that 9 out of 10 runners are people just like you who at one time hated to exercise? What if you made exercise less about what you lose and all about what you gain? How great would it feel to accomplish something you once thought was just for “those other people”?

Are you just not athletic? Is your hate for exercise part of a fear of how others will perceive you? Perhaps you were the person who was always picked last for kickball. Not all exercise needs to be about how well you perform. A great deal can be said about just showing up! If you don’t have the athletic ability or find that you basically have two left feet you should still give it a go. The classes at your local gym might have people there that might seem like they should be on dances with the stars or the gals in the spin class could do the tour de France, but I can assure you they didn’t start out this way.

Could you change the name of “exercise?” If exercise is such a “bad” thing in your mind how about you create your own name and a new relationship? What if instead of exercising you simply made an appointment to “shake it”? Shake what your mama gave ya!!! Do you enjoy music? Do you have an ounce of rhythm? Maybe spending some time with some great tunes and moving your body around is all you need to create some new healthier habits for now. In time you will find it easier to do more. Just by starting small and adding more over time you will feel increasingly more empowered. The more you start to move the more you’re going to want to move.

Are you limiting yourself to just the gym? The reality is that while people flock to gyms in alarming numbers every year as they make resolutions and as the spring and pending summer months come, the truth is most people hate the gym. The gym lacks accountability and creativity. Nobody to ask where you have been and the same old boring stair steppers and ellipticals right? How about getting outside more? Walk away the pounds on the sidewalks you pay all that hard earn tax money for. Team up with friends for accountability and take turns selecting different routes each time I walk. This way you have something new to look at while you’re walking. Great things to look at and great conversation.

Do you have a fitness library? Chances are you have bought one or two exercise videos in the past, but have maybe become bored with the workouts or the instructor. What if you could exchange videos with others you know to create your own library? Or perhaps you could even visit your local library to see what options they have. If they don’t have exercise videos maybe you could donate some and encourage others to do the same.

Do you want to get pumped up? So you might not have an interest in lifting weights, but not all exercise is just about aerobic conditioning like walking and cycling or even dancing. We do need some level of strength training for optimum health. This could be done with weights, or bodyweight training or you could even do this by volunteering somewhere you have to lift things like boxes or pull weeds or even work a paintbrush. If you have not done this sort of activity in a while you will wake up some muscles you have not used in a while and feel great about doing it. You can choose to find some sort of strength training or you can choose to have bone loss that will lead to osteoporosis. Which do you think is more fun?

Ever played musical cardio machines? This is sort of like musical chairs. What if you break up the exercise and set them to music? Just by using an iPod or mp3 player, you can jump from one machine to the next every time the music changes. Any one song is roughly 3 to 5 minutes, and as you make your rotations on the equipment you could easily do a 20-minute workout. The small breaks between exercises will be a great point of recovery and offer some great intervals in your training. The same thing can be done by selecting 3 to 4 weight training exercises or strength machines you can rotate for each song.

Overall you will find that learning to add exercise into your daily life will be a gift that will keep giving back to you. You just need to be willing to make a move! Not all exercise will be enjoyable to you, but thankfully you have lots of options. Read while you sweat, share exercise with a friend, go to your library and see what they have in the way of fitness DVDs, get outside and train or just simply think outside the box when you take on new activities. Every day there are increasingly new and exciting exercise programs available with a variety of intensity levels. We now even have video games that involve activity and some systems even have trainers that guide you through a workout and teach you better nutrition.