The world is full of articles, posts, and unsolicited comments about why to exercise—usually focused on long-term physical and mental health benefits.
But just like music, wine, or good food, cardio exercise is worth falling in love with for its own sake.
Here’s how.
History
The great Aldous Huxley thought people find God in their muscles. Our ancestors found transcendence dancing together in the light of bonfires. We still do. At a rock concert, mosh pits are a modern bonfire—ecstatic movement in a new form.
This is a first principle: People want to exercise together, to music.
No less a luminary than Barbara Ehrenreich has written a 250-page book cataloguing the human need for movement. She explains: Dionysus, the god of dance “was not worshiped for ulterior reasons (to increase the crops or win the war) but for the sheer joy of his rite itself…he is the ecstatic experience that…defines the sacred and sets it apart from daily life.”
Exercise is an opportunity to connect with that sacred realm.
Science
A true maximizer is going to want more tangible assurance than my fanciful historical musings. Fair enough.
The data are everywhere: cardio exercise lights up the brain’s reward circuits almost instantly. A Google search for “exercise and mood” will get you to plenty of sources explaining why exercise—specifically cardio exercise—has an immediate impact on mood. If you want a whole book, try Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain by John J. Ratey and Eric Hagerman.
Roadmap to Falling in Love
Here are five predictable and proven strategies for maximizing the euphoric feeling of cardio exercise, rooted in history, science, and my own experience:
- Turn the radio up (for that sweet sound). Listening to fast music that you love turned up loud is the single most important step to loving cardio exercise. This is the core of what our ancestors were after, and what our hearts and bodies still crave. We can now play any song, any time, anywhere, as loud as we want, without disturbing others—what a world!
- Vary the pace. Our bodies and hearts want to vary the pace. My running club recommends three 20 second all-out sprints at the end of a run. You can do speed intervals on any programmable cardio machine. I personally love (and also hate) short intense 30 second intervals on the Assault Bike at my gym, where your arms and legs are both pulling as hard as they can. There are plenty of High Intensity Interval Training (“HIIT”) workouts online that achieve the same thing without any equipment. Those short bursts need to be infrequent to avoid burnout. But peppering them into an overall cardio strategy once a week is transformative for mood (and also happens to be one of the healthiest things you can do for the long term—but that isn’t what we are here for).
- Go outside. Human beings are meant to be outside far more than we usually are today. Here is a good podcast about the benefits of being outside. But if you’re like most of us, you don’t need a podcast to tell you that it feels good to be outside. We need Vitamin D, birdsong, and nature to be truly healthy. So when you can, do your exercise outside.
- Get together. Movement and community somehow fit together. There is something powerfully transformative in a group dance class. I don’t like to talk when I’m exercising, but I love knowing that my friends are out there at the same trail, going at their own pace. And I love that moment of connection when I see someone else also struggling and we say something short to encourage each other. If you don’t have any fitness friends now (I didn’t when I started), you will get them, and they’ll become some of your strongest bonds.
- Let your mind go. So much of our lives are spent directing our attention. Exercising is one of the few places where we can simply let our minds go. For me, cardio exercise is the opposite of meditation. I’m not trying to turn off my mind, or direct it to my breath or some other particular aim. Instead, I’m letting it wander wherever it goes, sometimes into imagination and daydreams, sometimes something far less focused. The rest from directing my mind is a core part of the experience.
Getting Over Yourself
Worrying about how you look, and how well you’re doing, is a barrier you just have to get over. Unless you’re a fitness model or an Olympic athlete, it just doesn’t matter.
My running gait is awkward, and despite running for years I’m still lucky if I come in under a 12-minute mile in a race. My running partner, on the other hand, has perfect form. In candid race photos he looks like a god of running, and I look like a mess. It just doesn’t matter.
There is no shame or embarrassment in cardio fitness. When we are doing heart-pumping exercise, we are coming as close as many of us ever will to the sacred Dionysian rites Ehrenreich catalogues.
The joy is the rite. That’s what you’re falling in love with. Let everything else go.
The Fully Invested Lawyer 
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