Exploring Our Why

The best path to uncover our true desires lies in the body. Our embodied experience of how goals and activities feel to pursue can highlight where there’s personal resonance.

The most sustainable and potent motivation is experiencing joy and curiosity within an activity. Cultivate joy for exercise and fascination with fitness to remove the need for constant external motivation.

Everywhere we go, people are telling us what we should want and do. Bigger muscles. Less fat. Run a marathon. Deadlift 400 pounds. Lose 30 lbs in 30 days with this secret program. All this noise makes exploring our own desires more challenging.

Gaining a deeper understanding of what we want is crucial to embracing exercise in an enjoyable and effective way. It’s hard to enjoy exercise if there’s something we truly want from it and we’re not progressing toward it. Making sustained progress is difficult if we haven’t clarified what we’re aiming for.

If we can’t escape it, perhaps we can use memetic desire to our benefit. Maybe by modeling intuitive fitness, we can inspire each other to desire our own paths. At the least, we can create a little safe haven for people interested in embracing exercise from within.

So rather than view it as a choice between intrinsic or extrinsic motivation, embrace both. Cultivate intrinsic motivation to create a constant source of fuel that doesn’t wane. Embrace goals or desires as they emerge to increase motivation and accelerate action. Just continue to look within for guidance on what you actually want.

At the core of Intuitive Fitness is a nudge toward intrinsic motivation where we are driven by the satisfaction of doing an activity instead of a specific outcome.