Lowering the activation energy required to do cardio by getting my own treadmill in the living room really helped me get into the habit of doing cardio more regularly.

Now instead of paying every month for a gym membership I rarely used, I end up doing a good 3-4 hours of light cardio every week, opportunistically, because it's so easy to get started, and I can play music and watch shows while exercising without worrying about disturbing others, making it a much more enjoyable experience overall.

This is exactly the reason why I like working out at home instead of dressing up and taking the time to travel to the nearest gym. And well, coming back from it too. In the process, I've even worked on improving my form while only been using my body-weight and a stress rope, instead of ego lifting at the gym.

I've always really hated exercise, and I still do. I've never been able to get into the 'exercise zen' that some people talk about. No matter what approach I take, even going back to when I was young, exercise was unpleasant.

Not surprisingly, nothing I tried over the years for exercise stuck very long.

Until I arranged my life that I had to ride my bicycle to get to work.

I absolutely do not look forward to riding each day. I will subconsciously look for excuses to not ride. (We do have a car, but my wife is the primary user of it. So sometimes if I know she won't need the car that day, I'll cheat and drive that to work.)

But overall, it's been a pretty revolutionary change. I'm getting a reasonable amount of cardio nearly every work day.

Some of my friends have tried to make exercise inherently enjoyable, but I see this as usually a lost cause. Using myself as an example, there are very few exercises I would enjoy. And would I even do an exercise I enjoy regularly anyway? Basketball can be fun, but I never felt motivated enough to play unprompted, so it's not enough. Plus, basketball is nowhere near as good cardio as cycling.

Given that excuses are easy and that you probably can't make exercise enjoyable enough, the best option I can see is to make exercise unavoidable. Active transportation is my favorite here. Reducing friction helps a lot too, and might be enough for any particular person reading this, but I prefer to leave as little to chance as possible.

Absolutely. I basically stopped working out when I turned a section of my basement into a gym. I thought it would be nice to have the extra room, and ability to leave the equipment set up. In practice, it was out of sight out of mind. A month ago I moved some of my gear into my office, and have worked out every day since.