The Only Exercise Habit I Ever Kept Is the One I Deliberately Made Less Good

Four times I built a good exercise routine. Properly designed, progressive, the right number of sessions, all of it. The longest lasted nine weeks. The fifth attempt was a deliberately worse routine — fewer sessions, no progression, at a time of day that is not optimal for anything — and it has run for three years without interruption.

The obvious reading is “consistency beats intensity” and that is true and also not quite what happened. What happened is more specific: each of the four good routines had a precondition I could not always meet, and the bad one has none.

The first needed ninety minutes. Fine on most days, impossible on perhaps one week in four, and a week in four is enough. The second needed a gym, which needed travel, which needed the gym to be open and me to be near it. The third needed me to be rested, because it was demanding, and I am not reliably rested. The fourth needed a partner, and partners have their own weeks.

The fifth needs a floor and twenty minutes. That is the entire dependency list. It happens at a time of day when I am neither strongest nor freshest, which is exactly why it is available — nothing else competes for that slot, so it never has to win an argument.

Is it as good, session for session? Clearly not. Three years of it has produced a result that any of the four routines would have produced in eight months. But none of them ran for eight months, so the comparison is not between twenty minutes and ninety; it is between twenty minutes and zero, which is the actual alternative and which I refused to acknowledge for years because it felt like settling.

The thing I would generalise is not about exercise. It is about counting preconditions. Anything you intend to do repeatedly has a list of things that must be true for it to happen, and the reliability of the habit is roughly the reliability of the least reliable item on that list. A routine requiring equipment, a location, energy and ninety minutes fails whenever any one of those is absent, which is far more often than any of them individually.

I now write the list before starting anything I intend to sustain. Not to eliminate every dependency — that is not always possible and sometimes the thing genuinely requires a gym. But to know the number, because the number predicts how long it will last, and because I have twice noticed a dependency I could remove cheaply and had not seen because it was not the interesting part of the plan.

The other thing I would say, gently, is that the four good routines were not wasted. Each one taught me something about what I actually respond to, and the fifth is built out of those pieces. But I would have got there faster if I had been willing, earlier, to design for the bad weeks rather than the good ones. Every plan I made was a plan for a version of my life that occurs about three weeks in four, and habits are decided in the fourth week.