How to develop an ADHD friendly fitness routine

Published at , by Raffael Jesche, categorized as:

Recently I scrolled through social media and got stuck on a simple question by @c0debabe:

Anyone have any ADHD friendly fitness tips or resources?

Three hours later (instant hyper focus), my deconstruction was done. Now (three days later doing other stuff) I finally finished this text.

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Solution

I made it a short, daily routine: 10 minutes, every morning, before anything else.

It’s short enough to:

  • get started without being overwhelmed
  • do it while other things seem more important
  • pull through the last 4min when I’m already bored or feel sick

It’s long enough to see and feel an effect. And it’s daily! If I forget it once, I still practiced a whole hour per week. Missing a weekly, one-hour session instead would halve the overall time. Missing a weekly routine twice probably ends it for all eternity.

How I got there

It evolved from a daily reminder (10min during the day). Often I didn’t practice. Instead of feeling bad, I tried to double the time after a missed day.

I coupled it with watching news (another task checked) or with procrastinating on YouTube (didn’t feel bad afterwards, because at least I practiced).

At some point I finally realized, that mornings are a useless timespan. I literally can’t think. But I’m able to move. So I replaced 10min of staring into the void with training.

After realizing, that my emotions are tightly coupled to music, I added “5min listening to music” to my daily tasks. Now I could check two daily tasks after one training session from my list. Watching news moved to the morning bath routine.

Goals helped a lot. After commiting to a show at an open stage, I had to practice multiple times per week. Goal: being able to speak after 10min of movement.

Some more iterations, some more goals, a lot more awareness about myself… Now every day starts with 30min of training and dancing. Maybe I’ll up it to 40min soon. If I’m in a rush, 10min is the minimum. Not debatable.

Side effects

Making it a habit solved many problems:

  1. An empty, useless timespan every morning is filled with something healthy, that I enjoy.
  2. Training, dancing and music help me to get awake. Often I’m able to think in less than two hours.
  3. Making decisions – especially in the morning – is exhausting. Because it’s a strict routine, I don’t have to decide anything. When I bust myself debating about something more important, I remember the reasons: I need it to stop staring into the void and to be able to make decisions. Realizing it and maintaining my routine makes me happy.
  4. Some days are useless. Nothing works. But at least I practiced.
  5. Finishing two tasks (music, training) from my daily reminder – every morning – causes a small dopamine spike.
  6. The music stays on after practicing and causes dancing during breakfast. Nice! Sadly, it also has bad side effects:
    1. I can’t hear my shower timer anymore (can live with that).
    2. I don’t hear my coffee sizzling. This is dangerous (fire involved, old gas stove). If I don’t eat nearby, I have to remember to start the coffee timer. I accept that risk.
  7. After a few months I really know my old music library. I listened to albums, I heard decades ago, which brang back childhood memories or great moments at concerts.
  8. The last thing I want to do in the morning is tidying up. So I always clean my living room to have enough space for training tomorrow.

Conclusion

“Just” make it a habit. To get there, combine fun, multiple goals and other side effects.

Accept, that a new routine will break some others. When you notice it, deconstruct it (writing, talking).

Really: make notes! In a few months or years, that beautiful daily training routine will suddenly fade away. Some side effect may be lost or not important anymore. But they were esential to start the routine. Using full-text-search in my notes folder helps to find the lost path. Now I can try to replace anchor points to get started again. Or I just needed that reminder (loved to do that thing every day in the past, but randomly stopped months ago) to restart the routine immediately.

It’s that easy ;-)

Trivia

Three days ago, I allowed myself to have a break. No obligations, no appointments, nothing urgent (OK, my plan was to clean up – nothing very urgent). So I scrolled through social media, read blogs and got stuck on that question.

A few lines became an article. After pausing my “monthly task” of publishing a blog post for four months, this felt great. Also I planned to write about my ADHD strategies anyways, but didn’t expect it to be in English (new task: translate it to German). Because of that sudden instant hyper focus, I forgot to finish my morning routine (brushing teeth, watching news). Also I forgot to eat. Because I didn’t go to the supermarket (part of the plan to tidy up), I ate muesli for lunch after 7pm – which caused pyrosis (hungry and no time to soak because the supermarket closed at 9pm).

During the last hours, to finish this post, I learned a lot. About the blockquote’s cite attribute or the cite tag. I started to read a blog post about @matuzo’s head section I found in @c0debabe’s feed – and was able to stop that side quest. Then I found a bug in markdown-it-attr in combination with markdown-it’s linkify inline parser, read many lines of source code and found a workaround (new task: open bug report).

Keep this in mind, if you want to trust my advice about building routines ;-)

But at least I practiced this morning.