In my youth it was rock climbing. You can’t really quit something if it means falling to your death 🤣

But seriously anything that keeps your brain occupied. For me it was competitive sports. Basketball, ultimate frisbee, anything like that. Now that I’m old, it’s getting up from my chair to go pee. I also like what I consider “exercise games” like Beat Saber.

Tl;dr… anything that tricks your brain into seeing it as fun and not exercise.

Run directly away from home, when you get bored, you’re 50% done. Run home if you want it to be over faster

My method for hacking my brain is wakeup exercise. Finding a short exercise which I can do faster than I can talk myself out of it. I started with 5 pushups. That’s all. A tiny number, 10 sec exercise which I do as I get out of bed in the morning.

The important part is not to “push the envelope” or whatever. The amount of exercise should be small enough that it doesn’t bother you. And only do the exercise today. Don’t think about yesterday, don’t think about tomorrow. You only have to exercise once. Today. Easy. 10sec, 30sec, whatever. Then move onto whatever weird and cool shit you wanna do with the rest of your day knowing that you have exercised.

I feel like I’m cheating, cos it’s so simple yet so effective. I now do a lot more than 5 pushups, but the concept hasn’t changed.

When the weather’s nice, I like biking. In terms of ADHD stuff, doing a thing that takes you out of your house on a loop effectively forces you to complete it. Like, if I go for a 2h ride and then decide I’m not into it half way through… I still have to keep going. But also, just being outside with varied scenery tends to make boredom much less of a problem.

When it’s hot, swimming. You can get into a really nice rhythm with it, and it’s a truly outstanding full-body workout. Also, once your endurance gets high enough, if you are doing long-distance sets, you will get fatigued, but you will also 100% be riding that endorphin high, which is kind of a fun sensation.

When it’s cold (like, New England cold, not CA cold), mostly just walks. And skiing.

I usually have to pair things up, like I rarely ride my bike just for the sake of it. Most of the time it’s to get groceries, go shopping, etc. and sometimes the stores I go to are ~10km away. I’m really lucky that my city has actual factual cycling infrastructure though, so I pray your area has at least acceptable infrastructure.

This doesn’t always work, sometimes I don’t need anything. So another way I can get my butt on my bike is to simply put on sunscreen. Doing that makes it a lot easier for me to get out there so as not to waste the sunscreen. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I never go to the gym though. Way too complicated for me.

I haven’t been able to exercise successfully since I moved from home.

Where my parents live there was a great 5km run which included hills, scenery and if you did it backwards it was more strenous. They sadly exploited the fuck out of it and built a railway across it.

Where I live now it’s boring, hard to get to or too slopey.

As with many things, it didn’t stick for me until it did and once I was in the habit, it’s actually harder to skip than to just go. Even if I’m not thrilled about the workout, I still end up going because it’s wired in now.

That said, I do listen to podcasts almost exclusively at the gym and that can make it kinda exciting if there’s a good one coming up.

Have you tried rock climbing? I have some friends with ADHD who really took to it.

Does running up and down the stairs repeatedly because I keep forgetting things upstairs count?

Whenever I fall out of my exercise routine, I rebuild it in small chunks. At my peak, I was waking up at 4a, walking to the gym, doing 60+ minutes of weight lifting, 30+ minutes of cardio, then walking back home.

So, when I’m starting from zero again, my first goal is just to walk to the gym and back each day. I don’t even go in, I just force myself to get up (probably not quite as early), and go through the motions of walking there and back.
Once I have that down, I start trying to get myself up a little earlier so that I can go in the gym and actually do something. That something should initially still be something easy, so it might just be walking on the treadmill for 15 minutes before heading back home. Every day/week, I try to increase the duration/intensity until I get back to my ideal routine.
Some days I have a serious case of the "I don’t wanna"s, and on those days, I tell myself that I just need to walk there, and if once I’m there I still want nothing to do with it, I can leave, but I usually end up staying for most to all of my typical routine.

I find that setting myself small, incremental goals is way more effective than setting one big goal, because with one big goal, if I can’t do the whole thing, then I failed, so why do anything at all?

Once I get into the routine, I find that it really helps me in so many ways, and definitely helps my ADHD. I really like morning workouts, but my friend does much better with evening workouts. Try different times of day to see what works best for you.

Heavy lifting is the only thing that’s stuck for the way my brain works. I used a program called 5x5:

• only 5 different lifts to learn, each full body so there’s no fiddly minmaxing
• more or less timeboxed. 5 sets of 5 reps 3 times with about a minute between each rep and set. To improve, you add more weight, not spend more time
• consistent, once you get the routine down, and you know roughly how long it’ll take, you can just let your body take over, coast on muscle memory and motor neurons, zone back in in an hour when you’re done
• numeric satisfaction as your weights increase in fixed increments.
• immediate gratification because functional strength is neat and comes on surprisingly fast

Downside: So hungry, all the time.

It’s been a few years since I’ve been active. I used to live in an apartment directly above a gym. Now I live in the boonies and need to convert my carport into a garage before I can buy a weight set.

YouTube workouts go by quicker for me. I also have a rebounder (mini trampoline) which I find addictive enough to stick to. It also just takes a lot of practice to make a habit of exercising even if I don’t feel up to it. It helps to start with short workouts on YouTube and work up to longer workouts over time.

I have a Garmin watch that you can load with exercise programs in conjunction with it’s phone app. The couch to 5k running program works well.

• It sets a schedule
• It tells you what to do for that day
• Guides you during the run
• Records your progress
• Sets a clear goal you are working towards

Other than that I listen to audio books on my run.

are u sure you’re not using adhd as a crutch here? people make up excuses to stop exercising while exercising all the time. you might just be reaching for the easiest thing to blame here. try doing something fun too and not doing shit where you can get distracted and shit. I can’t do a gym routines just cuz my brain wanders off during sets and whatever, but bike like 400miles a week and it’s not mentally exhausting for me.

Swimming does wonders for me. You can think about tons of stuff while swimming, it exercises many muscles at the same time, easy to get the hang of it and tiring if you do it enough!