The Best Workout is the One You’re Actually Going To Do

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I was recently listening to one of my favorite thinkers, Naval Ravikant, and he said something very simple but very profound: “The best workout is the one you’re actually going to do.”

This quote has sat with me for a few days because it made me reflect on much of my past and it gave me inspiration to just move without worrying how I do it. 

I remember nearly every day of my middle school and high school years (ages 13-18) telling myself I was going to work out today.

In my head, that meant lift some weights. I was very caught up in the idea that I would HAVE TO get into lifting weights because I wanted to have a chiseled, muscular body like some of the other kids around me and weights were the only avenue to get me there.

Well, the problem was I had no real interest in weight training. It was so boring to me. I did it here and there when I had a friend with me or it was part of my team’s workout curriculum. But all in all, I couldn’t possibly find a way to make this interesting for myself.

So unfortunately, I spent almost every day of my teenage years promising myself that I would workout, with no intention of actually doing so. In the process, I felt bad about it and about myself because I was placing this unnecessary guilt upon myself.

I wondered if I was just a lazy person. Did I not have any motivation? How was I ever going to get fit?

This internal struggle saw no forward progress until I discovered soccer.

Through my brother’s playing days, and seeing how talented he and his young teammates were, I became so intrigued. Combine this with the allure of the professional game (especially in Europe) and I was completely hooked.

Nothing had ever grabbed me the way soccer had. Best of all, I discovered a new form of fitness. 

Everything about soccer was enticing for me, so I took it to the park to start learning how to play. This mostly meant dribbling around the field with a ball and taking some shots at goal while listening to music. It hardly matters what I was doing though because it was a good enough reason for me to be running around for up to 3 hours.

Through this, I became interested in the professional soccer players’ unbelievable endurance, so I got more into running. I also noticed how muscular the players were at the same time and I wanted to be really fast, so sprinting made a lot of sense too.

I’d always loved kicking and always had wanted to learn a martial art, so I finally gathered up the courage to start taking taekwondo classes.

Sometime later, I got more interested in hiking for the nature aspect, rougher terrain, and full-body workout that it can be.

More recently, this has evolved into what I call rock-running. I have limited access to hiking trails but I do have a big lake near me, and there’s a lot of spots that use big rocks to protect the land from getting hit by waves and eroding.

So what I do is walk down to the lake and run, jump, and hop across these big rocks. It’s a lot of fun and helps me work on some important athletic skills like balance, agility, proprioception, and quick processing. 

Playing soccer got me interested in running and sprinting, that got me to look into hiking and rock-running, and all of these have led me to my barefoot and natural foot health practices of today.

It’s not a perfectly traceable line of events, but it got me away from the guilt of not working out and into a space where I only do things I love and even blog about some of them here.

It just took me pursuing the thing that I was most interested in to find even more fun things for me to do and realize what it is that I care about.

The moral of the story here is that it’s all about your interest. If you’re not into the idea of something, you just won’t be able to do it for a sustained basis and you’ll be unhappy while you’re doing it. So shift your focus back onto what grabs you and pursue it intensely.

A big problem with fitness culture is that there’s this pursuit of perfection for the all-encompassing, flawless workout routine. Everyone wants to argue, debate, and debunk whatever it is that they’re not currently doing when the reality is, they’re all completely fine. It just has to be something you want to do consistently!

Another way to look at it is: it’s much more worth it to choose the workout that you want to do on any given day than the one that you’re dreading because you’re going to do the one you like more often anyway. You’re not going to miss days on something you love, but you will when it’s not fun for you.

To this day, I have no interest whatsoever in weight-lifting. But, watch a good soccer game for a while and I will be craving a workout or a run or some kind of physical activity. It’s what turns me on to the whole idea of fitness.

I’m not the kind of guy who goes to the gym to use the machines. I like playing sports, playing in nature, doing martial arts, doing cool movement practices, and overall, getting my workouts in while I’m having fun.

That’s why I’ve graduated from many of the standard fitness practices that are pushed on us and moved onto things that are more realistic for me like soccer, rock climbing, movement practice programs, rock running, martial arts, and so on.

As soon as I get tired of something, I’ll drop it. Life’s too short for me to be pushing iron around when I hate every second of it.