Written by: Kyle Riley
Therapy Co-Founder
You know the feeling. 4.30am. The alarm goes off. Class is at 5am. The version of you who booked it last night is a stranger.
Or it’s 5pm. You’re in the car park outside the studio. Class starts in 15 minutes. Every part of you is making a case for going home.
As much as gym junkies will love to tell you that this is laziness, or proof you don’t really want it. It’s actually quite normal, and how the brain works.
The motivation we’ve been told to wait for, that energising feeling that makes you bounce out of bed and into a class, isn’t a reliable starting point for anything. One, because its fleeting and two,because motivation usually follows action, not the other way around. You don’t feel like moving and then move. You move, and then feel like it. Think about it, once you are in the class that resistance that you had prior disappears and doing ‘the thing’ is way easier than you built up in your head.
Whilst this is great information, it’s absolutely no help for the 4.30am version of you.
So here are three things that actually work. Practical, grounded in what your nervous system is doing in those moments, and tied to the classes that make showing up easier when everything in you is saying don’t.
The hardest part of getting to class isn’t the class. It’s the gap between where you are and where you need to be. Getting changed, into the car, through the door, onto the mat.
Your brain is very good at measuring that gap and very bad at being fair about it. When you’re tired or flat, the gap looks twice as wide as it actually is. That’s why getting up at 4:30 for a 5:00 class can feel impossible on a Monday and totally fine on a Saturday.
The fix is to lower what you’re committing to. Not the class. The next step.
Don’t commit to going to class. Commit to putting your gym clothes on. That’s it. If you’re dressed and you still don’t want to go, fine. Don’t go.
What happens about eight times out of ten is that once you’re dressed, the second step looks smaller. Then the third. Then you’re in the car. Then you’re in the studio. Then you’re sweating, and the version of you that didn’t want to come is gone, replaced by the version that’s grateful and proud you made it.
This is called behavioural activation in therapy contexts. It’s used in clinical treatment for depression. Action first. Feelings catch up. And for some bonus points, if you can tie these actions into alignment with your personal values it will give you an even greater sense of purpose and achievement.
Where this lands at Therapy: if you’re going to use this trick, pick the easiest possible class to show up to. A breathwork restore session is the lowest bar. You don’t lift anything, you don’t sweat, you lie down for 45 minutes and someone guides your nervous system into rest, the last part is pure soundhealing, where you can purely just lie and enjoy the immersion. Connect Yin is the second lowest. Forty degrees of infrared heat, deep stretch. Start where the door is the easiest to walk through. Build from there.
The brain weighs decisions in real time, badly. At 4.30am the cost of going to class is enormous (warmth of bed, comfort, sleep) and the cost of not going is invisible (a vague sense you should be doing more with your life, which is easy to ignore when your face is in a pillow).
You have to make the cost of not going louder.
The simplest way is to book in advance and put cost on it. A booked class with a late-cancel fee attached to it is not the same decision as a hypothetical class. It’s a different category of choice. Now you’re not deciding whether to go. You’re deciding between the cost of not going vs going.
Most of the time, your brain will go to the class.
This works because of something called commitment device theory. The version of you that books at 9pm is calmer, more rational, more in line with what you actually want for your life. The version of you that wakes up at 4.30am is none of those things. The 9pm version locks the 4.30am version into a decision they would have made anyway, if they could think straight.
Use that. Don’t trust yourself to want it in the morning. You won’t.
BONUS: For some people the class booking might not be enough, make the cost of failing greater than the benefit of inaction.
The third thing, and this is the one most people get wrong, is the assumption that you have to bring something to the class. Energy. Mood. Motivation. A good attitude.
You don’t.
The whole reason you booked the class is that the class supplies the thing you don’t have. The program, the lights, the music, the heat, the instructor, the people around you, the room. All of it is doing the work for you. Your only job is to be in the room. The room takes care of the rest.
This is genuinely how the nervous system responds to environment. Walk into a candlelit Connect room at 35 degrees and within about ninety seconds your breathing slows down whether you want it to or not. Walk into a Cycle room with the lights low and a track you can feel in your chest, and your body recognises the cue to move before your brain has caught up. Walk into breathwork and lie down, and your parasympathetic nervous system starts doing what it’s designed to do without you needing to make it happen.
You don’t have to be ready. You just have to be there.
The class will meet you wherever you walk in.
If you’re trying to use any of this, pick the right room. Showing up on a hard day is easier when the class itself is doing more of the lifting than you are.
For the days you’re flat and have no energy: Breathwork and sound. You lie down. That’s the whole brief.
For the days you’re tense, sore, and over it: Connect Yin. Hot stretch in 40 degrees. The heat does most of the work.
For the days you’re carrying something and can’t put it down: RunLift. The physical output gives the emotional weight somewhere to go.
For the days life is too serious and you need to be somewhere louder than your own head: Cycle. Lights down, music up. Let that child-like joy of singing to your favourite tunes and dancing like no-one is watching (because they aren’t) take over. It’s harder to think when the room is moving with you.
Once you know which class fits which kind of day, the decision gets a lot smaller. You’re not asking yourself whether to train. You’re asking how you would like to feel after. That’s a much easier question.
The days you don’t feel like it are not the days that don’t count. They’re the ones that count the most. Not because moving on a flat day does more for your body, but because what you’re really training is the part of you that keeps showing up when nothing inside is asking you to.
That part of you is what holds the rest of your life together. The discipline you build by walking into class on a day you didn’t want to translates into harder conversations, better sleep, less spiralling, more resilience in places that have nothing to do with fitness.
So next time you’re sitting in the car park after work, making the case for going home, remember that the version of you who walks into class anyway is the one you’re trying to become. Not the version who always feels like it. That version doesn’t exist. None of us are that really.
The version who goes when they doesn’t feel like it. That one’s real. And every time they show up, they gets a little easier to find.