> mental baloney that you're some special snowflake because you find exercise unpleasant... we're all feeling the pain here.
The other poster already addressed this, but I'll add: this is the sort response that always comes up.
It clearly costs different people differently, in terms of mental energy and willpower. This "we're all feeling the pain here" is a vaguely polite form of the sort of "just suck it up, wimp" response that I've come to expect.
It clearly costs different people differently, in terms of mental energy and willpower.
Comparatively speaking, we are all wimps anyway. A Kenyan elite marathoner can run my old mile PR twenty-six times over. An elite powerlifter reps out my squat max for a warmup.
Which is why I said "proper relative intensity." If 10 pushups for you scores a four on the pain scale, but 100 pushups for me scores a four, then you do 10 pushups while I do my 100, and we both feel the same amount of "extremely unpleasant" feelings together. Both of us gain in terms of adaptation to capacity for work and pain tolerance.
I'm not sure what you're envisioning in your head as "extremely unpleasant" pain, but the saying goes that you don't have to train AT your max to UP your max. Exercise done at relatively comfortable levels of pain will still produce positive adaptations. That's why Couch->5K is so successful, it basically starts people off walking instead of running. But again, I don't care if you dance, run, row, lift, bike, hike, walk, whatever... it sounds like you are staying active already, which is great.
Ah. You're assuming that the original poster's dislike of exercise is the same as your dislike of the pain of exercise. They're not necessarily the same.
As it happens, I dislike exercise as well, and it's not because it hurts. (As you point out, it doesn't have to hurt.) It's because it's unpleasant in a lot of ways, it's boring (no matter what exercise I try), and I don't get anything else out of it. I don't enjoy being out in nature, I don't get a feeling of accomplishment from moving around, I don't feel better afterwards. This is true for exercise at any intensity level. As it happens, my life is active enough to keep me fit without extra exercise, but if I had to dance/run/row/lift/bike/hike/walk/roller skate/rock climb/ski/anything in order to stay healthy, I'd dislike it. That's just how it is. Some people do not like physical exercise, period.
The other poster already addressed this, but I'll add: this is the sort response that always comes up.
It clearly costs different people differently, in terms of mental energy and willpower. This "we're all feeling the pain here" is a vaguely polite form of the sort of "just suck it up, wimp" response that I've come to expect.