Why You Don't Exercise Even Though You Know You Should. And Strategies To Get Over the Hump. | Katy Bowman

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey, everybody, how are we doing? One of the biggest problems that many of us face when it comes to our own health and wellness and longevity is that we know exercise is good for us, and yet we often just don't do it. Maybe we do it in short spurts, maybe we never do it.

In any event, it's a huge problem, especially at this time of year when many of us are making resolutions to exercise more, resolutions that, statistically speaking, are likely to be broken and abandoned by February. Side note, all of this is also true for plenty of other activities, including meditation, but today we're really just focusing on exercise. The foundational thing to know is that this really is not about laziness or lack of understanding or lack of character or stick to ness. It's really that life is complicated and habit formation is really hard. So today we're going to talk to somebody who wrote a whole book with the taxonomy of the many, many reasons we don't exercise and a bunch of really smart and sometimes rather deep strategies for getting over the reasons we don't get our bodies moving.

Katie Bowman is a biomechanist who runs a movement education company called Nutritious Movement. She's the author of 11 books, and her most recent is called I Know I Should Exercise, but the subtitle is 44 Reasons We Don't Move and How to Get Over Them. In this conversation we talk about what a biomechanist does, what Katie means by movement as nutrition, how to determine your own movement diet, the distinction between movement and exercise. We go through many of the reasons why people don't exercise.

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