Opinion: When women don't exercise, it's for these good reasons

We get the point of working out, but getting to the stage where we can switch off and do it is another matter. Photo / 123RF

OPINION:

Here's how our day began. I got up and made a coffee. He got up and hit the rowing machine. I resisted toast and had yogurt. He walked three miles to a meeting and logged the results on Fitbit. At 9am I got a WhatsApp from my long-suffering, very occasional personal trainer (leased from a friend who says I should be "doing weights") and told him I would commit to a training time just as soon as I'd checked some stuff. He offered Zoom. I said I'd see how the morning went.

Almost half of British women do no vigorous exercise, according to a new survey, while two thirds of men exercise regularly. The Lionesses may be just as fit as the Lions but an awful lot of us are not keeping up with the blokes and as one of the idle 47 per cent, I think I know why. Many will tell you these alarming figures are more evidence of the unequal domestic burden; we don't have time to go to the gym or roll out the mat on the kitchen floor. But as someone who is back to a two-person home, with not so much as a dog to walk, never mind a school uniform to iron, I have more time to exercise, more reason to (need to keep up that bone density), more self-care awareness than I had before lockdown, a husband who cooks, and I still can't get around to it.

"You've got to make it part of your routine," he says, nipping out in his running shorts (zzz), but women don't know what's going to happen from one day to the next. That's the giant difference between us. We don't have the luxury of a guaranteed sacrosanct time slot because during that hour we might have to ring our mum's doctor or explain to the middle stepchild how to deal with a wasp's nest, or talk down our friend who is waiting for test results and – whether we like it or not – these all take priority over exercise.

Want to protect against dementia? Oh, yes. Wish to stave off osteoporosis? Definitely. Like to be lithe and not bulge out of your swimsuit? That would be nice. Absolutely we get the point of exercise. We just can't get to the stage where we have cleared the decks quite enough to switch off and do it. Exercise (unless you're Carla Bruni… two-hour workouts a day) is for most of us females an excellent idea until someone needs something that we cannot, in good conscience, say is less important than our love handles.

That's the deep root of it but not the whole story. Here are (some of) the other reasons why we find it hard to commit:

1. We didn't sleep well. Boy, that is an understatement.
2. The hot weather, plus all the big and little life things, is making sleep not remotely restorative and doing burpees in this state feels like self-sabotage.
3. We're not fully recovered from Saturday night. Henceforth, we're not drinking the "strong" rosé, but had not made that call on Friday and now we're feeling feeble. A bit of yoga stretching would be okay but we're preserving our energy for the more beneficial weights training.
4. We can't afford to get sweaty hair as there's no time to wash it before the thing later on.
5. We're having a sort of fast day (not eating lunch) and probably better not do vigorous workouts.
6. We swam in the sea on Saturday and on the chart of Wellness Good Things sea swimming trumps the lot, and gives you one pass.
7. We have a choice, but with the other things on the list we don't have a choice.

That's what it feels like anyway.