What To Do If You Feel Like You’re Not Good At Exercise

Have you ever felt like you’re not good at exercise? If so, you’re not alone. Many people have this belief about themselves, and it makes it hard for them to stick to their workout plan.

With some dedicated effort, you can overcome those limiting self-beliefs and grow into someone who is good at exercise, who feels confident in a gym setting, and who, believe it or not, actually likes to work out.

Read on for some practical steps you can take to stop feeling like you’re not good at exercise. In this article I’m going to talk specifically about strength training, but this concept could apply to any kind of exercise.

Your Limiting Beliefs About Exercise

We all have stories that we tell ourselves about who we are and what we’re capable of. Sometimes those narratives and beliefs hold us back.

Feeling like you’re not good at exercise is one of those limiting self-beliefs. You might also think you’re just not an exercise person, you don’t like strength training, you’re not sporty or coordinated, or you’re not naturally strong.

These beliefs can stop you from achieving your goals. Consciously or subconsciously, you might not try so hard because you’re convinced you’ll fail. You might find excuses to skip workouts or take it too easy in your training sessions when you do make it to the gym.

It’s important to realize that these narratives are not true, or at least they don’t have to be.

To overcome the idea that you’re not good at exercise, you need to start challenging it and prove to yourself that a different narrative is true. You need to build an accurate representation of your current capabilities.

You do that in your workouts with something called “mastery experiences”.

Mastery Experiences

Mastery experiences are opportunities to achieve small goals or build on skills. They are the experience of taking on a small challenge and feeling like you successfully conquered it.

Mastery experiences are different than achieving long-term goals. This is not like setting a goal of bench pressing half your body weight and then celebrating a few months later when you achieve it.

That would feel great, but to combat your limiting self-beliefs you need to stack up hundreds of little wins.

If you need help with your long-term goals, download my FREE Goal-Setting ebook. This eBook walks you through the process of setting goals, breaking them into actionable steps, and creating plans to achieve them.

Human brains are stubborn, and these beliefs can be deeply ingrained. Each individual mastery experience may be small and subtle, but these positive experiences provide layer upon layer of evidence that your old narratives are not true and that your new ones are. This is how you rewire your brain over time.

Examples of Mastery Experiences:

• Doing one more rep with the same weight you used last time

• Using a slightly heavier weight

• Doing a slightly more advanced version of an exercise

• Moving a little more smoothly during an exercise

• Moving through a bigger range of motion

• Feeling more comfortable in the gym

• Feeling more confident to push yourself

As you stack up mastery experiences, you’re also building the skills of strength training. You’re learning to brace your core, improving your mind-body connection, increasing your movement skills, and much more. You start to get good at strength training.

It’s a lot more fun to do something you feel like you’re good at than it is to do something you feel like you suck at. As you start to feel like you’re good at strength training, you’ll probably find that you start to like your workouts and feel more motivated to do them.

How To Stop Feeling Like You’re Not Good At Exercise

To challenge and change your beliefs about your exercise abilities, you need to set yourself up to have as many mastery experiences as possible in each workout.

To do that, you should scale your exercises and your workouts so they’re just a little challenging, but not too much. You should also focus your effort on doing a little more in each workout.

Scaling Your Exercises

Scaling exercises to your ability level means doing an easier variation or using a lighter weight that allows you to perform the full exercise successfully with good form.

Let’s say you’ve been doing push ups. Like many people, you may not be ready to do full push ups from the floor, because they’re hard.

Many people try floor push ups anyway, either by dropping to their knees or by only lowering themselves down an inch or two. Their form breaks down. Their elbows flare out to the sides and they sag at the hips.

These are not good push ups, and it’s easy to internalize that as a negative experience, thinking “I’m just not strong enough”, or “I’m not good at push ups.” This is exactly the wrong message, one that will further solidify your limiting self-beliefs.

In this case, the best thing to do is to scale your push up exercise, making it easier so you’re able to do the full exercise properly.

A scaled-down version of a floor push up is called an incline push up. In an incline push up, you place your hands on an elevated surface, like a barbell in a power rack or the back of your couch. That means less of your weight is positioned over your upper body, so it’s easier for your chest and arms to push you up. The higher up your hands are, the easier the exercise is.

Ideally you would do this exercise in a power rack or smith machine where you can easily adjust the height of the bar. You would figure out the lowest height at which you can still perform the full push up with good form.

With most of my clients, I start with the bar around their chest level and have them attempt a couple of perfect push ups. If they can achieve it, I lower the bar down one level and try again. I keep lowering the bar until they aren’t able to maintain good form. Then I raise the bar one level, and that becomes their starting point.

Once you have your starting point, you work on push ups at that level for a while. When you get stronger and that’s too easy, you go to a slightly lower surface that’s more challenging but you can still do the full exercise properly.

When that’s too easy, you go slightly lower again, and then again, and so on until eventually you can do a full floor push up.  

It’s the same idea with weights. You should be choosing a weight for each exercise that’s a little challenging, but still allows you to do the exercise with good form and feel successful at it.

Scaling your exercises or starting with light weights doesn’t mean you’re weak or bad at exercise. It means you’re smart, because you recognize the importance of building confidence and having positive experiences in the gym.

Later, once you’ve overcome the idea that you’re not good at exercise, you can push yourself hard, take on big challenges and aim for heavy weights if you want to.

Trust me, there will be plenty of time for that later. For now, make sure that you set yourself up to be successful at every exercise you attempt.

Make Small And Consistent Progress

Once you’ve spent some time practicing your scaled exercises and feel confident with your form, the next step is to start making some small, consistent progress in each session so you can feel that you’re getting better.

In each exercise you should be aiming to do just a little more than you did the last time. This is based on an essential exercise science principle called “Progressive Overload”.

To learn more, read my full article on progressive overload.

Progressive overload is usually applied to make sure you get results from exercise, but in this case it’s an important way to make sure you’re accumulating mastery experiences.

How To Make Progress

You can progress any way you want, as long as it’s small and consistent. You might try to gradually increase the weights or try slightly harder versions of the exercises you’re doing.

Here’s the system of progression that I use for myself and with my clients. It’s called the “repetition range method”. I describe this method in more detail in my progressive overload article.

For this method, pick a range of repetitions to use in each exercise. I’ll use 8-12 repetitions as an example.

You start by finding the weight that makes it challenging to do the bottom number in the range (8 reps, in this example) with good form.

Every time you do that exercise again, try to do just one more rep with the same weight. Just one more. That’s a small and achievable progression which will give you a mastery experience.

Eventually you’ll be able to do the top number of reps in the range with that same weight (12, in this example). In your next workout, increase the weight slightly and start again from the bottom of the range.

When you increase the weight or the exercise difficulty, increase it the smallest amount you can.

If you try to increase the weight or reps too much, you risk using poor form or not being able to complete the progression. Then you’d be getting the wrong message: that you’re not strong enough to progress.

I want the opposite for you. Every time you challenge yourself in your workout, I want you to be successful and feel like you’re becoming a better exerciser.

Track Your Successes And Celebrate Them

Finally, it’s essential that you keep track of your successes and celebrate them, no matter how small they seem.

Every time you’re able to do one more rep, use a slightly heavier weight, or do a slightly harder variation, you have gotten better at strength training. Every time you feel a little more willing to push yourself in a workout, or are able to feel your target muscles a little better, you’ve gotten better at strength training.

This is proof that this story you’ve been telling yourself, that you’re not good at exercise, is simply not true.

Celebrating your successes by writing them down, acknowledging them, giving yourself a mental high five, or sharing them with others helps you internalize this new reality.

Eventually, you’ll start to see yourself as someone who is good at exercise, and that will put you on the path towards achieving your goals.