Why You Exercise Matters As Much As Whether You Exercise
….Maybe Even More
At the end of my last blog I touched on something that I wanted to expand more on: intention. What I mean by that is the intention behind why we exercise, and what drives that particular session or our overall motivation to exercise.
This often comes up when I’m working with people and their relationship with movement and exercise. Most people genuinely believe they are exercising for good reasons. And of course, sometimes they are. But sometimes, when we slow down or pause to consider it, there’s some other under current at play.
If we look at this simplistically, there are two kinds of exercise….
There's exercise that resources you. It fills something up. You finish and feel more like yourself — clearer, calmer, more present. Maybe a bit tired, but the kind of tired that invites rest rather than demanding more.
And then there's exercise driven by something else. Something more urgent. It’s exercise that is really a form of management — of feelings, of self-image or of the anxiety that moves in if you skip a session.
The tricky thing is: it can be challenging to determine which one it is. The phrase ‘listen to your body’ is said so often, but, for some, this is a complete unknown concept and especially so if you've spent a long time over-riding the body’s signals for whatever reason that may be (and there are many).
This second kind might look identical from the outside. Someone doing the same route, gym class, or ‘progress building’ plan as someone else. But underneath, the intention can be very different. And that difference matters — because it shapes what the exercise actually does to the nervous system, and what it costs to keep doing it.
High-intensity exercise driven by stress, compulsion, or the need to escape something tends to add to the body's load rather than reduce it. You're already running on adrenaline. The session might feel good in the moment — the familiar surge, the sense of doing something. But cortisol that was already elevated doesn't always come down the way it would if the exercise had come from a less agitated place.
Doing that once in a while may not be ideal but is likely manageable when someone is able to listen to and respond to the body signals for more rest, recuperation and / or nourishment. But doing so consistently over time, and over riding the signals (intentionally or otherwise) pays a toll on the body that it doesn't always show up until later.
What kind of intentions are we talking about?
Here's a non-exhaustive list of intentions that might sit beneath exercise for many people (mostly these are unconscious drivers):
To punish. To prove something. To prevent feeling bad. To feel productive when everything else feels out of control. To earn permission to eat. To maintain an identity ('I'm someone who runs'). To hold self-esteem together. To not have to sit with what's underneath. To fit in.
None of these are shameful. They make complete sense as human responses to difficult inner states. But it’s worth acknowledging some of these drivers here.
Because exercise used this way — as a form of control, avoidance, or self-management — tends not to feel like enough. There's a relentlessness to it, a goalpost that keeps moving and sessions that should have felt satisfying but somehow don't. It can feel like finishing a workout and immediately calculating the next one, feeling relief rather than enjoyment or dismissing the session based on what the fitness watch says afterwards.
Contrast this with exercise that comes from wanting to be in your body — to be in nature, to be with people you like, to feel your cardiovascular system working, to build strength that serves you, to give your brain the chemical conditions it needs to function well or to feel physically challenged and then fully enjoy and own a sense of achievement from it (that last bit matters!). This is exercise that tends to feel like a choice, not an obligation. Something you get to do, not something you have to do.
The problem is that you can't always tell from the inside
If you're disconnected from your body — and many of us are, often for very understandable reasons — you can be doing the second kind of exercise while entirely believing it's the first. The narratives are convincing. I just love running. I feel so much better after. It's good for me.
Those things might all be true. They also might be the story the mind has learned to tell, because the alternative — slowing down, not always ‘doing’ or sitting with what's actually there — feels too uncomfortable to consider.
I know this feeling. As an athlete, I spent a significant amount of time training from exactly the wrong place — fuelled by anxiety, the need to prove something, the discomfort of stopping and a very low self esteem and lack of self. What I did looked like dedication to others and I believed that too. It seemed like passion but actually there was mostly very little joy in it (sadly). Actually I was on a roller coaster of pushing myself because I thought it was the only way that people might like me, and where I had some worth (again, sadly).
It took me a long time to understand the difference behind my drive to train and exercise, and what enjoyable and nourishing exercise was for me. And it took a lot of learning about what it was to listen to my body, and how to do that. It took unravelling the beliefs that I had held firm but that weren't actually true.
That's partly why this matters to me professionally. I've been in it. And I’m out the other side too.
The practices I eventually found useful weren't complicated but they made a big difference. Before a session, I'd try to actually feel into it rather than just deciding to do it. Imagining the training and noticing whether my body felt any kind of readiness, or whether what I felt was more like dread or a driven urgency. Asking what the exercise was actually for that day — was it about training, or being outside, or having company, or letting my mind wander? Different answers pointed to different kinds of movement. And sometimes, to the realisation that what I actually needed wasn't movement at all. It DID take slowing, and pausing and learning to feel rather than over-ride, but it paid off dividends; sport has continued to be a part of my life and is more enjoyable now than it has ever been to me.
Going against the grain
Something that makes all of this harder is that the world is extremely loud about exercise! And what we ‘should’ be doing.
Social media, wellness culture, fitness plans, trending workouts, 'what I do every morning' content — the message is relentless, and it's usually some version of more, harder or optimised. There's always a new protocol. A new metric. A new thing your routine is apparently missing.
And when you're trying to slow down and actually listen to yourself, all of that noise can feel genuinely frightening. What if I lose my fitness? What if I fall behind? What if doing less means I become someone who doesn't try, someone who’s lazy or someone unhealthy?
These fears keep a lot of people locked into exercise patterns that aren't actually serving them.
But what I've seen, both in my own experience and in working with others is that exercising on your own terms, from a place of genuine self-knowledge, tends to be more sustainable over the long term. Not less. When movement comes from actual awareness of what you need — rather than from fear, or habit, or the pressure to match someone else's routine — it has a completely different quality. It becomes way less complicated and something you can maintain through life, not something you have to white-knuckle your way through or feel guilty about when it slips.
Knowing yourself — really knowing what you need, what depletes you, what genuinely resources you — is one of the most useful things you can build. I won’t lie, getting there means challenging yourself in a different way. But it puts you in the driving seat of your own health in a way that following someone else's plan never ever will.
Slowing down enough to find out
The way forward often involves doing something that feels counterintuitive: pausing before you act, rather than defaulting to the plan.
Some things that can help:
Before you exercise, notice. Where are you starting from? What does your body feel like right now, honestly? Wired and depleted, or genuinely ready? Is there an urgency to get going that feels more like anxiety than energy?
Feel into the session before you do it. Let yourself actually imagine it — not plan it, but feel it. Does it land with a sense of readiness, or something more driven and urgent? That difference is information.
Ask what you're actually after. Connection? Solitude? Strength? Fresh air? To feel less chaotic? The answer doesn't mean you shouldn't exercise — but it might change what kind of movement actually makes sense.
Notice what happens if you consider not doing it. Ask simply to gain information. Does the idea of skipping it feel like a neutral option, or does something uncomfortable immediately move in? That gap is worth knowing about.
Reconnecting with the body's actual signals can feel strange or even unsettling at first, particularly if you've spent a long time in your head, or if your body hasn't always felt like a safe place to be. Going gently matters. Having support matters.
But the alternative — exercising in ways that look healthy from the outside but are in fact self depleting — tends not to be sustainable. And it tends not to address whatever is underneath.
The question isn't always whether to exercise but who is deciding, and why?
As always there is nuance in every individual’s experience and story. What I mean by that is that this blog is not another ‘here’s how you…..’ article. If any of this rings true for you, you want things to change and you dont know where to start then feel free to reach out. You don’t have to figure it out alone.