Soreness, discomfort, shortness of breath or with motivation at an all-time low. Do you know what it's like?

Not getting started properly after a workout break because you hit an abrupt obstacle every time you try to resume a good routine.

Or have never really found the joy of physical activity and perhaps have had a string of bad experiences with exercise over the years, I can reassure you that it's not because you:

When you can't handle physical exertion and experience discomfort when you try to increase the intensity, it could be because your interoception (inner sensing) is out of sync.

Your brain over-interprets mild symptoms of exertion and energy expenditure as over-exertion and over-expenditure.

There is a mismatch between what is happening in the body (the sensing) - and what you perceive is happening (the interpretation). The bigger the gap, the more discomfort we feel when we exert ourselves.

The result is the same.
You stop.

As the most natural reaction in the world, the priority will always be to stop the discomfort you're currently experiencing, so you don't make it worse and all the rational long-term benefits of exercise fall to the bottom of the list.

But that does NOT mean that exercise is not good for you.
It just means that you need to reassure your nervous system with exercise - and increased physical exertion.

Discomfort and pain that arise in connection with and as an extension of movement is most often about the brain not being able to predict what resources a given part of the body at work, under specific circumstances, needs in order to fulfil the task.
This is because you may not know that part of your body very well under the given conditions, and because the brain lacks quality signals and/or is unable to make a sufficiently accurate interpretation of what those signals mean.

For example, if you are not used to having your arms above your head, even with an extra load, it is difficult for the brain to adjust the blood pressure so that the working muscles above heart level receive the right amount of blood supply.

When you train your interoception, the insula (the interoceptive centre in the brain) will become better at decoding and matching the processes that take place when you go from rest to work - and from work to rest as smoothly as possible.

If you don't master your interoception first and train your brain's ability to decode how demanding a given task is for you, you'll be slowed down every time you want to exercise.

Because the more you avoid physical exertion, the more your ability to sense and interpret the magnitude of challenges becomes downregulated - which only makes your comfort zone smaller.

You need to rebuild or strengthen that brain-body connection so you have an accurate picture of what's going on. So that it does NOT feel more violent than what you've actually done.

You need to optimise your body map by covering the blind spots that most frequently occur when you're moving - and cause you to run into pain, tension or lock-ups when you increase your pace, load and/or number of steps.