I caught up with an old colleague today. We worked together in health improvement and, as these conversations do, it wandered through work, family, money, injuries and exercise.

She has recently finished an MSc, but her current coaching work has dropped to around 15 hours a week. She has time to exercise, a spin bike at home and walks her dogs every day.

“I've got the time but no motivation,” she said. “I keep staring at the spin bike.”

NOTICE

That caught my attention because my experience is almost the opposite. I've exercised routinely for around fifteen years. Even fracturing my clavicle didn't really stop the cycle; it changed it. I continued using the step machine at the gym and recumbent cycling, while rehabilitation gradually turned into upper-body strength work.

There are several things happening here that look familiar through Zesti's five regenerative mechanisms.

There is cycling in fifteen years of repeated behaviour, but also in the repeated pattern of intending to exercise and not quite starting. There is harnessing because neither of us is beginning from nothing: she has dog walking, a bike and years of health knowledge; I had an established exercise routine that could be adapted after injury.

There is synergy too. Less work means more available time, but it also means less money, greater uncertainty and more stress. The same change can simultaneously remove one barrier and create another.

Diversity matters because the spin bike is only one possible route to physical activity. And allostasis is visible in my own response to injury: maintaining something didn't mean returning to exactly what I did before. It meant reorganising around changed conditions.

Perhaps “lack of motivation” isn't the problem at all.

Perhaps it's something we're noticing about the current ecology.

DIRECTION

That changes the question.

Instead of asking, “How do I make myself exercise?”, perhaps the question becomes:

“What do I want this part of my life to look like?”

My direction after injury was towards rebuilding strength. I already had an established exercise routine, a gym and fifteen years of repetition to work with. Those conditions helped shape what came next.

Her starting point is different. She has dogs that already get her out walking, a spin bike sitting at home, more available time than she wants, years of health knowledge — but also reduced work, financial pressure and uncertainty about what comes next.

The spin bike might fit the direction she wants to travel.

It might not.

DECIDE...

And that's where it becomes her choice.

With what is already present in her life, what is the next — or not — step?

To be continued…