It depends on what exercise I’m doing. Swimming feels good to a point. Kickboxing can really feel good if I’m feeling aggressive. Most of the rest of what I do doesn’t really feel good, but I know it’s good for me.
Not everything in life feels good.
Like a few people already mentioned, I usually barrel through my cardio with my iPod. I put it as loud as my ears can handle without hurting so that I can focus more on the music than anything else.
During the actual time, exercise doesn’t feel good to me. I get bored of it pretty easily. I get sweaty and hot and tired, it’s annoying.
However, I do find that the rush of endorphins after a good 30-60 minute cardio workout feels awesome. I’m on cloud nine and for a good half an hour I feel invincible, new, and that all of my previous worries are an insignificant matter in the distance. I feel so relaxed and refreshed; the only thing that it’s really comparable to is getting tipsy off a good drink or after a trip to a Japanese bath house.
I never want to go work out. I want to go to dance, but that’s different. I don’t want to go lift weights or run or do the elliptical or any of that ever.
And while I’m doing it it doesn’t really feel good. Weights do sometimes, for the first few reps because I can feel myself getting stronger. By the last couple it’s a lot less pleasant. And I’ve never been running and thought “wow, this feels fantstic! I don’t feel like my organs might explode at all!” and it is boring… I depend heavily on my ipod and keeping track of my time to distract me.
It doesn’t hurt, exactly, though. I mean my muscles ache but it’s not a bad ache. It’s easy to tell the difference between “feel the burn” and “ouch, I’ve done some damage” I mean it’s like the difference between stretching and getting punched in the face.
And I’ve never gotten a runner’s high, but I do feel overall better when I’m active and working out than I do when I’m not really doing anything. And I feel better about myself when I’ve worked out than I do when I haven’t.
I love the feeling of exercise and the post-exercise high.
What I don’t like about exercise are the peripherals involved. Getting in my car and driving to the gym (and I know I could run on the sidewalks here, but I’m in an extremely metripolitan area full of traffic and obstacles at all hours of the day. I’ve done it but it’s stressful to do so), changing there in the kinda dirty changing room and having to lock up my stuff, then working out, changing back (usually without showering until I get home, again due to the cleanliness thing), driving back home, and throwing those gym clothes in the laundry basket, resulting in 2x the work on laundry day.
sigh all I need is a home gym and a personal assistant to do my laundry and I’ll be golden.
Exercise is boring and painful for me. Not to mention that there’s a good chance that my joints or tendons will be fucked for a few days afterward.
It hurts *until *it feels good, in my experience. I’m hardly ever dying to *start *working out, and so I trick myself by saying “I’ll only do 20 minutes”. And for minutes 7 - 15, it sucks hard. But the thing is, when that 20 minutes are up, I feel great and want to keep going. I’ve never gotten a “high” from it, but I do feel better, both mentally and physically.
The best advice I can give to people who say they feel terrible afterward is to try to finish up with a really good stretch and a really hot shower. I love how I feel after I work out, energized, but completely relaxed.
I’ve gotten to a point where I can get really high almost every time I lift weights or ride my bike, but it took me a lot of hard work to get here.
[loooooong elaboration deleted. short version: it was particularly hard for me and it sucked balls most of the time, but sticking with it has paid off and it’s been worth every drop of sweat.]
It depends on the exercise for me. For example, I like to do a little yoga before work and before school. It feels good, and I feel better and more awake and energized (but still relaxed) after doing it. I love to stretch. I walk with my dogs all the time. But back when I was training to ship out to the USAF I tried jogging every day, and even though I was a very physically fit 110 lb 18 year old, jogging was painful for me. It jarrs everything, it hurts my knees, my ankles, my neck, and gives me a headache. When it was too cold out my throat and lungs seemed to get so raw that when I exhaled I tasted blood. Proper running shoes and adjusting my posture/pace didn’t improve anything. Jogging and running are out. Situps? Sure. Jumping rope, biking, lifting weights, yoga, pilates, whatever else I am good with. I can walk for hours. But jogging hurts.
By the way, running feels like shit still. I am not exaggerating when I say I am in physical pain and threatening to puke after anything over 2 miles on most days. But I know from experience in weightlifting, biking, and hiking, that this is because I’m not conditioned to run. If I decided I was going to be determined to “get over the hump” in running, it would suck pretty bad, but I could do it in a couple months.
Or maybe not everybody’s body works the same way, and exercise really doesn’t do anything but make them feel bad. :dubious:
(Not to say that it doesn’t help the body et al. You know what I mean.)
(I still have that nagging headache from exercising earlier, by the way. Probably because it was the first night of class.)
I would recommend to people who think exercise really doesn’t do anything but make them feel bad to keep their nose to the grindstone. There were times when I literally felt terrible for 2 or 3 days after a ridiculously light workout, but slowly but surely my fitness level has risen. The human body is capable of so much more than most people think, it’s absurd.
Some does, some doesn’t.
Walking fast feels good. Running, forgetaboutit. Walking at my mother’s speed is torture. When I use weights machines, sticking to the activity levels gym monitors say I should stick at feels… like… yawn… notdoinnothing… To feel good, I have to up the level (I still think that, since my resting heart rate is high, my “proper heart rate when working out” ought’a be raised proportionally as well - I’ve had people tell me I had to work “hard enough to achieve [my resting heart rate]”).
I’ve got walker’s legs, good flexibility, no aim, equilibrium problems and laterality problems; for about 6 years (11-17) I also had quite painful ingrown warts in my feet’s soles and in my ankles. This led to things like dropping out of my tennis classes after three days because the teacher insisted in teaching me righty while my body insisted in playing lefty (“but I did hit the ball! Why does it have to be with the hand he says? I did hit the baaaaaaaaaaaaawl!”); SiL-the-doctor says the untreated, ingrown warts at that age may be one of the reasons that leg is almost 2" shorter than the other one.
I can “go for a walk” at 8:30, walk walk walk, stop to look at a window, walk walk walk, then go “gee, I’m starting to get tired, I’m a bit nibbly too” and discover it’s almost noontime. Yeah, wonder why I’m tired 
and why my inner clock is starting to think of food.
I think that 4-6 months of trying, and not seeing much improvement, is a fair amount of time. Of course, I have congestive heart failure, a tricky knee, and other problems. Incidentally, I had the health issues FIRST, and THEN I got fat.
Six months is about when I started seeing results. You don’t get out of shape in 6 months (assuming you were an average, active kid, you’re still pretty fit for years after they quit making you go to P.E. class), so you can’t expect to get into shape that quickly, either. But you are a special case. The trick knee can be worked around, but I’m not a doctor and would not give any exercise advice to someone with a know heart-problem (beyond maybe, “see a doctor” :).)
I hate working out. I know I should do it, I usually will do it, but I hate it. I’ve fallen off the wagon in the last few months, but for almost two years before that I went to the gym 4-5 times a week and worked pretty hard. I watched what I ate. I did lose quite a bit of weight, but I still was carrying extra weight - my body is apparently very good at storage. I never, ever enjoyed working out. I also never, ever got to the point of not craving junk food or feeling really satisfied from eating fruit instead of chocolate or sugar, which is another thing I’ve heard of.
At the end of a work out I feel sweaty, gross, hungry, and tired. I can grit my teeth and do it for my health, but people telling me I should also enjoy it is just not very helpful.
Any excercise I’m good at feels really good, be it walking for two hours at top speed or deadlifting for 12 reps. Doing stuff I’m not good at gives a real thrill once I’m done. As others have said, I feel virtuous after a workout. Not working out (when there’s no real reason not to) is emotionally damaging. But my body craves it, too. Once I’ve stayed off the weights for two or three days, I find I start to make fists and utter grunting noises at the computer and feel the need to hoist iron. It’s a great feeling and once I start, the strain feels just great. Blood surging through my muscles, reps keeping on piling etc.
Took a whole lot of feeling not-so-great to get to this point, though. It takes time.
Healthy food works the same way. I can eat low-fiber, high-sodium, high-sugar stuff and enjoy doing it, but the bill comes promptly afterwards: nausea, blood-sugar crash etc. Eating a healthy meal is not spectacular in comparison, but after I’m done, I feel good for hours. I won’t become hungry, I have energy and physical and mental stability. And the virtuous feeling of giving my body what it needs, not what I want.
One can get used to almost anything - getting used to healthy food is a pretty small adjustment. Low-sodium, low-sugar food tastes bland at first, but after a month of eating it, you won’t miss the salt at all, while sugary stuff starts to taste too sweet, and vegetables take up the role of candy. I honestly prefer a slice of bell pepper over a bite off a candy bar, from a purely sensory point of view.
Hey, nothing works for everyone, but my advice was offered from a perspective of “can’t hurt, might help”. I think a lot of people who hate working out are so thrilled to *stop *that they don’t really take time to cool down and stretch afterward. Lots of them may not need to, or it may not make any difference for them, and that’s great. I just know that for me personally, if I don’t, not only is my immediate post-workout glow of well being diminished, but I’m *much *more stiff and sore the next day.
I’d also say that if there’s a particular sort of exercise that you really hate, don’t do it, unless you have some very specific reason for needing or wanting to. I don’t mind the treadmill, but running on pavement is simply not for me. Clearly I’m never gonna run any marathons. But since my goal isn’t to run marathons, but simply to be generally fit, I can live with that.
That’s me. I love dance workouts and I look forward to doing them, enjoy them the whole time and feel great afterward. I do it early in the morning and then I have lots of energy for the rest of the day. I stick weights in every other day or so but I don’t enjoy that. I just do it because it’s good for me.
I hate gyms with a passion and if I had to work out on machines and do calisthenics I would never go. Even while watching TV it’s tediously boring to me and I hate using my own exercise bike. We have a pool so I swim a lot in the summer but I’d rather consider it accidental exercise and not turn it into a workout because relaxing by the pool is one of my favorite things to do. An old country place like this takes a lot of work, so if I spend a few hours chopping and hauling firewood then that counts as my exercise for the day.
I’ve never gotten this feeling from eating junk food, either.