You're Not Lazy. Here's Why Exercise Feels Impossible to Start

You know that getting stronger would improve your mood, energy levels, focus and even your chronic pain. Maybe you have a pile of exercise handouts from years of physical therapy, but you've never done any of them. You genuinely want to work out, but you just don't and you beat yourself up over it. Sound familiar? Well, guess what? You're not broken. You've probably been listening to advice made by and for neurotypical able bodied high achievers, which is either incomplete or plain old wrong for neurodivergent minds and chronically ill bodies.

Tools like accountability partners, habit building, rewards systems, the five minute rule, and putting out your workout clothes before you go to bed work for people who are only missing one or two puzzle pieces. But when you're neurodivergent or chronically ill, you can sometimes be missing the whole puzzle. The solution is to develop a complete system where every detail is designed to meet your mind and body's unique needs.

Watch the video below, or read on for the full transcript.

Hi, I'm Cas Winter. I'm neurodivergent and have been chronically ill since I was 14 years old and I know that finally putting in the effort to create a sustainable strength training routine for myself would be life changing. I recently used one of the tools from my program, the Action Navigator and put it to the test against my years of inability to do my physical therapy homework and it's been working.

Today I want to guide you through the exact process I used so you can replicate it at home. And I'm also going to give you a tour of my routine which I've set up in notion like the nerd that I am. Let's get started. Step 1 Define your purpose: having a strong why behind your exercise routine is important because it will help focus you and provide criteria for making decisions as we go through this process.

Here are some questions to help you determine your why. What are you wanting to feel like immediately after working out and long term after working out consistently? Answering both questions is really important. What are you hoping to have accomplished during your workout, for example specific PT exercises, heart rate metrics, etc.? What state do you want your three gas tanks aka your physical, cognitive and emotional gas tanks to be in after working out?

Once you're pretty clear on your why, I want you to format it like this: I want my workouts to help me blank. What you want to accomplish? Prepare refill my gas tanks and make me feel blank. Here's my why that I came up with. "I want my strength routine to help me stay within my window of tolerance and practice movement and strength skills refill my emotional gas tank and make me feel supple and refreshed."

Notice how I didn't say that I want to get stronger or reduce my pain? While those are part of my longer term goal, they're not what I want to experience immediately during and after my strength routines. Focusing on an immediate experience of staying within my window of tolerance, practicing movements as strength skills, refilling my emotional gas tank and making me feel supple and refreshed are much more tangible and therefore motivating.

So make sure you're focusing on the immediate whys for doing your routine, not just the long term ones. Step 2 Brainstorm your steps: next it's time to brainstorm all of the different steps that could go into your workout routine. This is the part where most people get tripped up because it's just as important to include the steps that will lead up to or transition you to your workout and the steps that transition you out of your workout.

A couple videos back, I talked a lot about reducing friction and adding strategic friction while working from home as someone who is neurodivergent and chronically ill, and this is where that concept comes into play here. If we don't anticipate our transition needs when designing routines for ourselves, our routines will only ever be plans that never come to fruition. Morning routines are a great example of this. We tend to make them aspirational instead of grounded in reality, leaving us hitting snooze again and again to avoid them.

Use your brainstorming method of choice to brainstorm all the steps you can think of that could be a part of your workout routine. We'll narrow it down next. Step 3, Narrow them down: in order to choose the right steps from your brainstorm to include in your routine, we need some criteria for making decisions. And that's where our why comes in. Turn your why into a series of yes or no criteria questions.

Here's what that looked like with my purpose. So my purpose was I want my strength routine to help me stay within my window of tolerance and practice movement strength skills, refill my emotional gas tank and make me feel supple and refreshed. From that purpose these are my criteria questions. Will this step help me stay within my window of tolerance? Will this step help me practice my movement and strength skills?

Will this step help me refill my emotional gas tank? Will this step help me feel supple and refreshed? Once you have your criteria questions, you can use them to grade each step from your brainstorm. If a step gets all yeses it's a great fit for your workout routine. If a step gets some yeses, it's a definite maybe. Include them for now, but give them another grade after completing the first draft of your routine.

If a step gets one or no yeses altogether, it's likely a no not to be included in your routine. By the way, if you're someone who gets overwhelmed just figuring out where to start on any given day, including with movement, I have a free tool called the Anytime Reset linked below. It walks you through exactly how to reset your day, figure out your priorities, and take action. 20 to 60 minutes of planning using this reset will save you so much time and energy.

Grab it for free at the link in the description box below. Step 4 Choose your order: now that you know which steps you want to include, it's time to put them in an order that will meet your needs. Here's a great exercise for figuring out what order to put your steps in. Write each step on a separate note card and then have one additional blank note card paired with each of those steps.

The blank note cards represent the transitions between steps. This is another place where people can get tripped up and make routines that don't work. If a transition between steps isn't accessible or doable, that means you need to either change the order of your steps altogether so the transitions are different, accommodate yourself to make the transitions easier, reduce friction and or add strategic friction. Use the note cards to shuffle the steps around and try different orders.

As you do this, you may discover that it would be helpful to define one or more of your transitions as explicit steps in and of themselves. By the way, this exercise can also be done digitally with a visual note taking app such as Milanote or Whimsical (not sponsored.) Let's take a look at three of the steps in my workout routine. Set up my workout space, Grab my iPad for videos and to track my workout, Change into workout clothes.

Now, if I kept them in that order, I would be setting myself up for procrastination and resistance because that order not only doesn't make sense, but it would involve a lot of extra going up and down stairs in my home, which isn't feasible with my pots and my bad knees. To make sure I'm doing as few stairs as possible, this is the order I chose for those steps.

Change into workout clothes first, grab my iPad next and set up my workout space. Last, here's a bonus for you to add variety or flexibility to your routine. Instead of defining a step in your routine as one activity, you can create a menu of activities to choose from. This is a great option if you have limited time and energy but have lots of activities that you want to spend your time on.

It's also great if your capacity varies widely from day to day. Step 5 Choose your cue: Deciding when you're going to do your workout routine isn't necessarily as simple as every other morning before work. The first thing to consider is when is your body the most capable of working out and why? For example, because of my POTs, working out in the mornings would make me really sick, and working out in the evening would make it impossible for me to sleep, so my only option is to work out in the afternoons.

Furthermore, because I sometimes go dancing on Tuesday nights, I don't want to work out on Tuesdays or Wednesdays to allow my body ample time to prepare for and recover from dancing. For example, dancing just five songs spread over the course of four hours a week ago made me feel like I was at death's door the next day, but it fills my soul, so I have to work around it.

Once you have a general idea of what days and times will work best for you to work out, the next step is to choose your habit cue. A habit cue is an existing event or action that can be used to cue you to take a secondary action. By the way, a habit cue does not have to take place at the same time. It simply needs to happen. For example, for my workout routine, I'm using the habit cue of eating lunch.

I don't necessarily eat lunch at the same time every day, but I do eat lunch every day. Turning an existing habit of yours into a habit cue for your workout routine can be one of the most powerful things you do. Do you already have an existing habit that takes place during the day's times when you want to be working out? If you have more than one, which one would it be easier to transition from in order to start your workout routine?

If you don't have an existing habit that you can use as a habit cue, what transition needs to occur during those days and times in order to get you to start your workout routine? And how can you make that transition easier for yourself? Are there accommodations you could make? Could you reduce friction, AKA blur the transition? Or would even adding strategic friction be helpful? Just like with the rest of the steps in your routine, taking into account what the transition will look like from your habit cue to the first step of your workout routine is crucial.

Step 6 document your routine: Next, it's time to document your finalized routine so you're not depending on your memory. The brain is optimized for utilizing information, not storing it. You can make something as simple as a list in the notes app on your phone or as complex as a notion dashboard. That's what I did and I'm going to show it to you in a sec. Whatever format you choose, make sure it's easily accessible if not outright in your face at the days and times when you want to transition to your workout routine.

So the first thing I want to show you is the loose order of what my routine looks like. I've got it over here in a call out and I'll show you where this callout lives a little bit later. But first I have my purpose listed at the top. I want my strength routine to help me stay within my window of tolerance and practice movement and strength skills, refill my emotional gas tank and help me feel supple and refreshed.

Then after that are my steps and I have them as checkboxes so that I can check them off as I go change into appropriate clothes. Get my iPad for exercise reference. Go to my workout space. Choose Exercises for today from the database below and I'll show you what that looks like in a second. Set up my workout space for today's exercises, do the exercises, roll out anything that wants or needs it, and then return my workout space to neutral.

So that is the loose structure of what my routine looks like. Now let me show you how nerdy I got in notion. Welcome to my movement dashboard. I have a picture of a zebra for the cover for this because zebra tends to represent those with hypermobile Ehlers Danlos syndrome. I once again have my purpose listed in a call out at the top of this dashboard. Then I have a calendar view of my exercise tracker.

I have my exercise library and I'm rarely going to be in it here. I'm going to be in it inside my tracker, but I just wanted it available in another location if I needed it. Now this part we're getting into stuff that I have learned from the amazing Annie Short who runs the Bendy and Strong program. She is who I have learned everything from to build a routine that works for chronically ill bodies, particularly hypermobile Ehlers Danlos syndrome bodies.

And so a lot of the nitty gritty details of the exercises that I'm going to do and how I choose which exercises to do when I've learned from her. So I highly recommend going and checking out her work. This part is just a really cool breakdown of the different parts of the body and I have decided to break my Workouts into push, pull, legs. So on any given workout I'm either doing a push day which is like pushing exercises with the upper body, a pull day which is pulling exercises with the upper body, or leg day which is pretty self explanatory.

And I will be doing midsection with each of those days. And then this last part, how to build a program are just all of my personal notes on the free class that Annie ran on how to build a program. So now let's go into the exercise tracker because this is the part where all the nerdiness happens. So this is a database inside my notion and I have three different templates.

One for a push day, one for a pull day, one for legs day. Let's go in and look at this leg day because that's what I've got coming up tomorrow. I realize it's on a Tuesday, but I am not going dancing tomorrow night, so it's okay for me to do a do a leg day tomorrow. I have my database fleshed out so I can track six different exercises at this point in time per workout.

I don't expect myself to do six exercises every time. I will be gauging that each time. When I'm choosing my exercises for the day, the title of the page is which kind of day it is. Push, pull or legs. Then the date that I'm doing the workout. And then I have a section for overall notes. And then I basically do this for each exercise. So exercise one, this is a relation field so I can select from my exercise database.

Then I have a text field for the weight that I'm using and I'm using a text field because sometimes it's just body weight and other times it's a particular kind of stretchy band. So it's like the yellow band or the extra light pink band. It's not just a number of pounds. So that's why I left it as a text field and not a number field. Then I have one for the number of sets, this is a number field.

Another one for the number of reps per set, which is another number field. And then I have another text field for notes. And I've basically done this six times. So there's one for one exercise. For now, I have them listed as warm up one, warm up three, and then lifts, lift one, lift two, lift three. As I'm getting into this, I'm really just doing the warmup exercises that Annie teaches and progressing those.

At this point in time, I'm less fussy about is it a warmup Exercise, is it a lift? That's more me planning into the future. So that way there's already structure in place inside my exercise tracker to allow for me to get stronger and to be doing lifts after my warmup exercises. Now, this is the fun part. We go down to the body of the page. And remember, this is a template.

So this exists in every single one of my leg day pages. Remember, we're on leg day. So I have this call out that I showed you earlier. And then over here on the right is another view of my exercise tracker showing me my previous workouts. So, as you can see, I did a workout on March 20, and I did a workout on March 18, and it's showing me the exercises that I did on those days.

And that's going to help me, A, remember what I did and B, decide, do I need to do something different today? There are so many different reasons that you might need to do something different. Your capacity has changed, your ability has changed. It's a high pain day. It's a really POTsy day. It's just helping give me context on what came before. So I did the lying face down lock big three lock big three on both March 18th and March 20th.

And what was interesting is it felt great on March 18th, but it felt weird on my neck on March 20th. So while this page is a leg day, the next time I go to do an arm day, which will be my next workout, I'll probably do something other than the lock big three to give my neck a break, for example. So this is giving me context for what came before.

Now, this is the real fun part. Down here I have a view of my exercise library, and it's curated specifically for legs day in this template. So there are midsection exercises, hips exercises, knees, calf feet exercises, and basically I get to go shopping. So that bonus I shared with you where you can create a menu of things to do in your routine. I'm doing that here. And what's interesting is how Annie talks about how this can be transformative for those with dynamic disabilities, such as Ehlers Danlos syndrome, where your ability changes from day to day.

And why focusing on a body part split. And there are lots of different ones. The one I'm using, push pull legs, is just the one that feels most accessible to me, but there are different versions. And so thinking, oh, I want to work my glutes today. I have a menu of exercises to choose from, so I can pick the one that feels most accessible that day. And that's going to help me be consistent over time.

So I have my menu again. Definitely go check out her work. It's, it's incredible. Her program is phenomenal and she offers a sliding scale like I do. So that's what legs day looks like. The push day and the pull day are very similar except the menu for the exercise library is curated for that kind of day. So on the push day I'll have menu of push exercises. On the pull day, I'll have a menu of pull exercises along with midsection and stuff like that.

So as part of my weekly reset, I went in here and I chose which days I was going to work. And so tomorrow's gonna be a leg day and then after that'll be a push day. And after last week, I learned that I need three days in between workouts. Two is just a little too fast, not enough time to recover. So I'm experimenting with three this week. So I'll be working out tomorrow and Friday and they're blank right now.

Cause I'll fill them in at the time I work out. So tomorrow when it comes time to work out, I'm gonna open up this leg day. I have it over here and I'm going to go down here, remind myself of my why, remind myself of my last few workouts and then look at my list. So I'll go and I'll change and do appropriate clothes and then I'll check it off.

I'll grab my iPad and then I'll check it off and then I'll go to my workout space, at which point I will choose my exercises for today. So I'll go down here and I will shop for exercises that feel accessible to me that day. And once I do that, I will go up here and I will link them into this page and then I'll do my exercises and so on and so forth and finish up my routine.

And I am so excited about this. Putting the time and energy into making this routine for myself and utilizing everything that I've learned from Annie Short and combining it with how I teach people how to build routines for themselves when they're neurodivergent and chronically ill. Putting my tool to the test alongside what I've learned from Annie has been transformative. I am working out, I'm doing it consistently, I'm not hurting myself and I'm enjoying myself.

So I'm really excited because I know that creating the accessibility and the consistency over time will create the long term goals that I want. It's, it becomes inevitable that I will get stronger and I will feel better as opposed to trying to make it happen faster than my body is capable of doing. So that was the tour of my routine. Now some of you will take what I've shared today and run with it.

And that's awesome. But if you're someone who has watched videos like this before, taken notes, maybe even tried to implement, and still feel stuck weeks later, that's not a willpower problem either. That's a sign you need more than information. You need a system. And you need support. My comprehensive productivity and self care program, the Action Navigator, is designed for those who are neurodivergent and chronically ill. It's packed with tools like the routine builder, cheat sheet you got a taste of today techniques and weekly coaching calls with me, all designed to help you master your time, get organized and offer yourself radical compassion.

If that sounds like it might be what you need, I'd love for you to book a free clarity call with my assistant, Shae. It's a short conversation to help you figure out if the Action Navigator is the right next step for you. Click here to schedule a time on Shae’s calendar. Remember, you're not lazy or broken. I don't care how many times you've attempted to start working out or start doing your physical therapy homework, you are worth another try.

A different approach like the one you learned today could be the thing that turns it all around for you. Thanks for spending your precious time and energy on this video. I'll be back in two weeks with another one. See you then. Bye.