I tried exercising for five minutes every day for a month—here's what I learned about forming healthy habits in the process

Man in shorts and T-shirt unfurling exercise mat in midair. He is outside on a balcony or porch.

Keep missing workouts? What's your excuse? Mine is time. Even if I jump out of bed with the best of intentions to exercise, something will derail me.

Lately it's my one-year-old, waking ahead of schedule and robbing me of the 30 minutes I had allocated to work out. If not him, it's unforeseen traffic jams, train delays or self-sabotage—going to bed too late and waking up too tired.

In a bid to restart exercising regularly, I've been trying fitness app WithU's Daily Sessions which have been designed to help users make daily exercise a habit.

Each day you have 24 hours to complete a short routine, which will be at most 10 minutes long. These range from yoga-inspired mobility flows to bodyweight strengthening exercises that, I've found, rarely make you break a sweat so they can be done anywhere, anytime while wearing ordinary clothes.

WithU's Daily Sessions take less than 10 minutes and aren't too demanding. (Image credit: WithU)

"We're trying to remove as many barriers to entry as possible," Rory Knight, WithU's director of fitness and experience, tells me.

Here's what I learned about making exercise a habit after one month of attempting to work out every day in February.

Overcoming indecision is half the battle

Through trial and error, the team at WithU have learned that motivation drops with every extra minute you spend scrolling through the app's library for a workout.

The longer you spend deciding which workout to do, the less likely you are to start (Image credit: WithU)

The same thing applies when you summon up the motivation to exercise, but haven't decided what actual exercises you're going to do.

The app's Daily Sessions feature makes the decision for you, but if you're making up your training on the fly, Knight recommends having a couple of go-to routines you can turn to that will help kickstart your workout.

For me, after years of training clients and tinkering with my own training plan, that's a full-body warm-up routine consisting of:

• 5 walkouts into push-ups
• 5 world's greatest stretch each side
• 5 reverse lunges with rotation each side
• 5 cossack squats each side
• 5 single-leg hip thrusts each side

The world's greatest stretch forms part of my go-to warm-up routine. (Image credit: Capuski / Getty Images)

Once you start moving, momentum often takes over. "What we've found is that once someone commits to some form of movement, such as a Daily Session, that leads to a desire to do more," says Knight.

"Lots of our users will use the Daily Session as a warm-up. Once their endorphins are flowing, they'll then jump into a HIIT workout or bodyweight strength class. It's often a gateway to more."

Even if you stop after the Daily Session, some movement—any movement—is always better than nothing.

Any new habit needs to be manageable

I'll come clean: I didn't manage to exercise every single day in February. Even in the shortest month of the year, time occasionally got away from me.

That doesn't mean my month of exercise was a failure—far from it. I managed to tick off two gym workouts every week and spread WithU's bite-size sessions across the rest of the month.

But it taught me that biting off more than you can chew—like training 28 days in a row from a standing start.

For Knight, adopting sustainable fitness habits means being realistic.

"A lot of people try to do too much too soon," says Knight, "or they follow a fitness trend like the 75 Hard Challenge that is quite simply unsustainable."

I discovered a manageable routine for me meant two weights workout a week. (Image credit: Getty)

Instead, Knight stresses that you need to find a manageable rhythm. For me, that meant just two gym sessions per week involving big compound exercises like deadlifts and squats, where in the past I might have aimed for four.

Anything more, like WithU's Daily Sessions, was a bonus.

Above all, be kind to yourself

Over the course of the month I quickly learned that establishing an exercise habit is not a linear process. As I discovered with my toddler's ever-shifting sleep pattern, you need to accept that bumps in the road are inevitable and not be too hard on yourself when they slow you down.

Don't be hard on yourself if other responsibilities mean you have to change your plans to exercise. (Image credit: Kseniya Ovchinnikova / Getty Images)

That wisdom often comes with experience, says Knight. "As I've gotten older, I've become a lot kinder to myself. Take running for example. I've had multiple injuries that have prevented me from running for weeks or months. When I was younger I'd have been so harsh on myself if my speed was down when I returned to running again."

Now, he says, he can be more philosophical. "No matter if it's the slowest time I've ever run, I'm just grateful to be running again," he says.

That's similar to the epiphany I had halfway through February. Instead of getting frustrated that I was only able to squeeze in a couple of gym workouts a week, I tried to savor every minute while I was getting a sweat on.

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