How do I help clients exercise when they are too tired to work out?

Energy is a key indicator of health and well-being. However, it can be a catch-22. You know exercise could help your clients and patients regain strength and stamina, sleep better, and manage stress but the fatigue is draining their motivation. How do you help them exercise when they are too tired to work out??

The underlying reason clients are stuck when they are feeling tired is that their body knows exercise could either make things better or it could make things worse. Chances are they have experienced exercise that made them feel tired and sore before. Their body and brain remember that experience, so when they think about exercising, their body tells their brain to put on the brakes. “Whoa, this thing you are thinking about doing could make you even more tired! You'd better stay on the couch a bit longer.”

Thinking differently is not enough though. We all know that knowing what to do doesn't make someone exercise. The only way to turn that mindset around is for your clients to experience exercise differently in their body. The body needs to rewire the brain so it knows exercise is something it can rely on to give them energy each time. That happens when they know three skills

1. How to meet themselves where they are, instead of pushing through fatigue, ignoring their body to ‘get it done’. Mindfulness is the key skill here. When they start with presence and curiosity about the root cause of their fatigue, they are most likely to be able to use exercise to recharge energy.??
2. How to tap into their Inner Trainer?. Rather than relying on someone or something to push them to exercise, they turn to their internal motivation or their Core Why for motivation to exercise. This releases what Self Determination Theory tells us is one of the key elements that supports lasting motivation: relatedness and autonomy. When they know what is most important to them about their well-being right now, and connect exercise to that Core Why, it becomes a powerful choice to be well now, rather than another task weighing them down further.??
3. How to move well so they feel better right away. This comes from moving the way the body is designed, based on movement and exercise sciences. Unfortunately, many popular exercises work against how the body is designed to move and grow stronger and sell the idea you need to feel worse now in order to be better later.?

These are the steps of my Be Well Now Method of exercising for whole-person health and lasting habits. It ensures you are not just treating the body and missing out on the mental, emotional, and spiritual energy drain that is ignored with the ‘just do it’ approach to exercising.??

This FREE downloadable PDF is a checklist your clients can use when they are too tired to exercise. This video gives your clients a mindful movement meditation they can do to discover the root causes of fatigue. This allows them to be more in tune with their body, giving you more information to help them treat the root causes of fatigue. The video and checklist are tools you can share with clients and patients so you can work together to use exercise as a resource for more energy.

I explain more about how to help your clients and patients when they are too tired to exercise in the video below.??

In future videos and articles, I will go into more detail about each of these ways to boost energy with exercise. Subscribe to Exercising Well on YouTube to be notified when new videos on this topic are released.???

Message me with your questions about this or any other challenge your clients are having with exercising and I will give you step-by-step guides for helping clients use exercise to enjoy whole person-health and lasting habits.??

https://youtu.be/VMb11Znm1z8

Sources

• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4826769/Bigliassi M, Bertuzzi R. Exploring the Use of Meditation as a Valuable Tool to Counteract Sedentariness. Front Psychol. 2020;11:299. Published 2020 Feb 25.?
• Schuman-Olivier, Z., Trombka, M., Lovas, D. A., Brewer, J. A., Vago, D. R., Gawande, R., Dunne, J. P., Lazar, S. W., Loucks, E. B., & Fulwiler, C. (2020). Mindfulness and behavior change. Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 28(6), 371–394.
• Contrepois K, Wu S, Moneghetti KJ, et al. Molecular Choreography of Acute Exercise. Cell. 2020;181(5):1112-1130.e16.?
• Pontzer H, Durazo-Arvizu R, Dugas LR, et al. Constrained Total Energy Expenditure and Metabolic Adaptation to Physical Activity in Adult Humans. Curr Biol. 2016;26(3):410-417.?
• https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/cell-energy-and-cell-functions-14024533/