Sports, exercise, and less-structured general activity are all aspects of life I have enjoyed and been passionate about for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, I loved running around outside playing various games and sports with my brothers, neighbors, and friends. I tried a number of different sports throughout elementary school and eventually ended up focusing primarily on soccer and basketball throughout late elementary school, middle school, and the start of high school.

This was mostly fun for me, but as time went on, I started to experience more and more pressure internally when it came to sports and athletic performance. I felt I had to be as good as I could be and increasingly feared any sort of self-perceived failure.

Once I started high school, this fear of failure + internalized pressure led me to train even more obsessively for sports, particularly basketball. The girls basketball culture at my high school was also relatively intense, which didn’t help my fears + obsessive tendencies.

The fall of my freshman year I would go to basketball shooting practice before school a couple of times a week, participate in (mandatory) gym class daily, and go to weightlifting or other basketball skills/conditioning training after school a few times a week. I was also still playing travel soccer (practices + games) on top of all this!

This increase in activity at the start of high school (combined with not seriously increasing my nutrition, which was more ignorance at the time rather than an intentional restrictive decision) significantly contributed to my spiral into an eating disorder. While this aspect of my story isn’t the main focus of this particular blog post, I mention all this to highlight how obsessive and unhealthy my relationship with exercise had become by the time I was finishing my first year of high school. As my weight started to decrease, I increasingly felt addicted to and compelled to exercise more and more.

[Side note on this which I hope to explore further in a future blog post: researchers have discovered a similar neurobiological phenomenon (the urge to exercise increasingly more when eating less) in animal models. From Carrie Arnold’s book, Decoding Anorexia: “In the 1960s, researchers discovered that if you limited a rat’s access to food and simultaneously allowed it to run on its wheel as much as it wanted, the rat would rapidly run itself to death, a phenomenon that looked eerily similar to what psychologists diagnosed as anorexia nervosa. The researchers called this behavior activity-based anorexia.“]

In college, I eventually ended up taking a total break from any formal exercise for about a year to further heal my body as well as my mind and heart attitude toward exercise. This challenging experience of overcoming compulsive exercise has therefore cultivated in me a passion, in both my personal and professional life, for pursuing life-giving and truly healthy approaches to exercise, sports, + general/less-structured movement.

From what I have learned in my own life and in working with clients, I’d love to share with you what I consider to be several indicators of a healthy relationship with exercise.

4 Indicators of a Healthy Relationship with Exercise: 

Eating enough to appropriately fuel your activity level.

Exercise is not meant to be a tool to compensate for what you ate, and just because you didn’t exercise a certain day doesn’t mean you should go out and seek to intentionally eat less.

Instead, I encourage listening to your hunger + fullness signals to help guide you in how much to eat on any given day. That being said, I also advocate a thoughtful + wise approach to nutrition which takes into account the reality of the importance of mindfully eating enough to support your activity level. Sometimes this looks like eating when you aren’t necessarily feeling hungry, because your body needs the calories/energy for your activity level.

Please note that if you are in recovery from disordered eating, it can take time before regular hunger cues come back. This is where working with a dietitian can be especially helpful in your journey to more freeing and intuitive eating.

Focusing primarily on how you want to feel (physically, mentally, emotionally).

A healthy relationship with exercise focuses more on how you want to feel, rather than on manipulating your body size or the way you want to look. You can’t directly control your body size, but you can have more ownership over how you feel physically by pursuing healthy behaviors like regular physical movement that you enjoy. This approach, in turn, is likely to lead to better physical health and maintenance of a healthy weight range for your unique body/genetics.

In addition, a healthy relationship with exercise takes into consideration the mental and emotional experience of exercise. Do you generally feel mentally present and calm when exercising, or compulsive and antsy? Do you experience feelings of joy and uplifting energy, or guilt and dread?

Ability to be flexible with exercise routines and schedules.

Do you have ability to be flexible with your exercise? When changes in your routine/schedule are needed, can you pivot without undue anxiety or stress?

Sickness, not sleeping well, and travel are a few things that come to mind that generally call for a change in exercise routine. The ability to listen to your body when sick or tired, or to adjust for things like travel are signs of a healthy relationship with exercise.

What’s more, are you able to adjust your exercise plans at times to accommodate for the more general activities of life? I’m thinking here things like dinner out with friends or volunteering for a project you want to help with in your community. I’m not saying to not have boundaries with your exercise routines if this is something you enjoy/find helpful as part of your regular self-care routine, but I do think it is healthy to be able from time to time to shift these routines to complement other important areas of life.

I see a healthy relationship with exercise as supporting, not overly interfering with, a meaningful + engaging life.

Engaging in activities you ENJOY, not think you “should” do.

What activities do you truly love and enjoy without considering what “might” lead to the body/look you desire?

How would you spend 30 mins or an hour moving your body each day if you were to solely think about what might be most fun or enjoyable to you?

What might it look like to incorporate more of this fun, playful approach to exercise into your everyday life? 

Additional resources to consider…

–> Is Your Relationship with Exercise Healthy?
–> Experiencing disappointment can be a normal, healthy emotional response to not being able exercise. Feeling overly anxious about this is (in my opinion) generally not.
–> Check out the Female Athlete Triad