5 Ways to Make Exercise Less Boring

Exercise feels monotonous and boring, and it’s the last thing I want to do with my free time.

Sound familiar? Believe us, you’re not alone if you feel this way. It’s hard to drum up motivation when you think something is boring. Nobody wants to spend their free time doing monotonous and tedious tasks! So, how can we make movement less tedious and more enjoyable—something you look forward to?

Savoring is a psychological tool that can help with changing our perspective. Let’s unpack this to transform “Exercise is boring” into “I’m motivated to do this!”

How to Make Exercise Enjoyable

Exercise can often feel more like a “should” than a want. You know it’s good for you in the long term, but you don’t want to invest the time right now. Temptation bundling is pairing something that has delayed rewards (exercise, in this case) with something that is pleasurable in the short term. In a large research study with over 6,000 participants, when subjects were told to pair their session with a pleasurable audiobook they only listened to when they exercised, it boosted their likelihood of doing a weekly workout by 10–14%. Why? When you temptation bundle exercise, it’s instantly less boring and more gratifying.

Being with friends can turn into a pickleball meetup. Your love for coffee can turn into a walk to the local café to grab a cup. Stretching your hips or being active in the garden can pair nicely with listening to your favorite podcast. To shift your perspective on exercise monotony, think about the type of exercise you’re trying to motivate yourself to do, then come up with some fun, enjoyable activities you can do or environments you can create at the same time. You can try some of these ideas:

• Take a walk at the farmers’ market.
• Call your sister while walking.
• Watch your favorite show at the gym (and only at the gym!).
• Wear your most comfy exercise clothes while you move.
• Bike along the prettiest streets.
• Book a class with your favorite instructor.

I (Diana) temptation bundle by stretching while watching our favorite family show, The Amazing Race. Teams are racing around the world, and I send my foot around in circles, or take a figure four stretch to work on my hips, or practice doing headstands with my kids. My body thanks me for it, and it feels better to move while watching people sprint to the finish line.

With temptation bundling, it’s pretty simple: to make your movement less monotonous, pair it with something else you love.

I (Katy) love rocking out to music, but between work and family time, I struggle to find time to blast what I want to hear. So for me, heading out for a walk is just as much about a chance to listen to music uninterrupted as it is the exercise of taking a walk. Looking forward to picking out my own music is often what motivates me at the end of the day.

With temptation bundling, it’s pretty simple: to make your movement less monotonous, pair it with something else you love. And be present while you do it (don’t worry, we’re about to teach you how!).

How to Savor Exercise

You can make movement less boring by bringing awareness to the full experience of moving your body…and savoring it. Savoring is the act of intentionally paying attention to, appreciating, and enhancing the positive aspects of an experience. When you savor your experience, it increases your positive emotions, helps with stress reduction, and can turn even the most mundane experiences into pleasurable ones.

The key here is to be fully present with pleasurable aspects of what you are doing—flexibly shining your attention spotlight on the good stuff. This doesn’t mean ignoring discomfort; it’s more about attentional shift—which involves perspective-taking and being present. You get to choose where you place your attention.

Try this right now: 

1. Let your chin drop toward your chest, then gently bring your right ear toward your right shoulder, then slowly take your left ear to your left shoulder. 
2. Notice: Where is the movement restricted? Where is it easy? 
3. Linger on the spots that could use a little extra love. Breathe into and around the areas that are tight and relax your shoulders. Close your eyes and luxuriate in the chance to rest your mind as you roll. 
4. Have gratitude for this moment to be with your body. Even the most monotonous things can become interesting when you are present for them and savor them.

There are five ways to savor an experience, according to Erika Miyakawa, a Japanese psychologist who researches savoring: thanksgiving, basking, marveling, luxuriating, and knowing. They all involve being fully present with your experience. Let’s explore how you can apply each of these to your movement or exercise.

5 Ways to Savor

Pick a physical activity that you usually find tedious or repetitive (for me, Diana, this is walking in circles around the airport while waiting to board, or waiting during my son’s baseball practice while he’s doing drills). Now try to apply each of these types of savoring to it. Notice how it changes your experience.

1. Thanksgiving: Appreciate the opportunity to move your body. Feel gratitude for this chance to move. Appreciate the place, people, and activities you get to engage with by moving your body.
2. Basking: Take in feelings of pride at growing stronger in your body with movement. Feel the accomplishment of living out your values, finishing a challenging workout, or meeting movement goals.
3. Marveling: Let yourself feel awe through movement. Be amazed by the beauty of nature, surprising sights, and the capabilities of your human body.
4. Luxuriating: Enjoy the physical and sensory pleasures of movement. Enjoy the good feeling of stretching your muscles, the release of tension and stress, the flow of your body, or the creativity of movement.
5. Knowing: Savor the wisdom that comes through moving your body—the knowledge you gain from interacting with new places, fresh faces, experiences, and challenges, or the knowledge gained by learning about yourself and your capacities.

The next time you find exercise a drag, dear reader, try this savoring skill and focus your attention on the positive aspects of movement. The most important factor is being fully present—shifting your attention to here and now, and the good that can come with moving your body.

Rethinking Movement: Make It Playful

Exercise often has to be slotted into our free time, where it’s competing with all the other things we enjoy doing. For many, exercise can feel like a chore: boring! Counting reps or laps, monitoring intensity, and paying attention to other metrics is the opposite of play, and when it comes to motivating ourselves to pick movement, we might need to boost the fun factor.

Think about the physical activities you loved as a kid, back before you thought about them being good for you and instead just thought they were fun.

Any movement can become playful—play has more to do with your attitude than the specific activity—and playful activities can be easier to stick to. Sports and physical games, like pickleball and Kubb (a backyard throwing game) count, but it’s also playful to get a weighted hoop going around your midsection for fifteen minutes while you’re standing in the living room. Reroute your daily walk past a playground, where you can go across the monkey bars, ride the slide, and hop on the swings to challenge your vestibular/balance system. Put on your favorite dance music and boogie. I (Diana) keep a big open space in our living room solely for the purpose of fun movement. Over the years we’ve played balloon volleyball and Twister, and made forts together there. Open spaces are great invitations for the whole family to move.

Think about the physical activities you loved as a kid, back before you thought about them being good for you and instead just thought they were fun. For me (Katy), some playful activities were “being a mermaid” in the pool for hours, riding bikes with my sister around our neighborhood until dark, and hitting tennis balls against the side of the house by myself. When you’re looking to add movement, there’s no need to pick from a list of activities you find boring. Find exercise that closely resembles your “play” list so it’s easier to choose.

This excerpt is from Diana Hill and Katy Bowman’s forthcoming book I Know I Should Exercise, But…: 44 Reasons We Don’t Move and How to Get Over Them (Uphill Books, March 2025) and is reprinted with permission from the publisher.