Why we hate to exercise: Expert advice on how to stay motivated

Twelve years ago, writer and photographer Bill Hayes was in a San Francisco gym, climbing aboard the StairMaster for a cardio workout, when he paused for thought. "I looked around the gym and saw all these men and women lifting weights, stretching, doing chin-ups and sit-ups. And I thought, how did we all end up here? If I were to trace a line back in time, where would I land?"

That question took Hayes from the gym to the San Francisco Public Library, searching for a book that would tell him. There was nothing to be found.

Several years later, he began researching his own, the newly released Sweat: A history of exercise. By then, Hayes was living in New York and the partner of Oliver Sacks, neurologist and bestselling author, who suggested that he begin his research in the New York Academy of Medicine’s rare book library. There, he came across a volume, dated 1573, called De Arte Gymnastica by Girolamo Mercuriale. That book sent him on an expedition covering 2000 years and three continents and led to Hayes, now 60, learning to be a boxer, qualifying as a personal trainer and even trying out running in the nude.

Along the way, he learnt of the many ways modern workouts are based on ancient wisdom. Even during a time when human biology was fundamentally misunderstood, classical civilisations realised the importance of regular physical activity, building gymnasiums where the goal was to keep fit both physically and mentally.

"There was an intuitive understanding that exercise was good for your body and your mind," explains Hayes. "Gymnasiums existed in almost every city in the Greek and Roman empires. They weren't open to everyone; these were really male, upper-class spaces. And they were for philosophising as well as fitness training."

Plato, an athlete and wrestler, wrote about the importance of balancing training the body with cultivating the mind. The physician Galen believed the best exercises both tired the body and delighted the soul. And Hippocrates produced treatises on exercise and health.

"He wrote about customising an exercise plan to a person's individual life and mixing it up, as we would say today," says Hayes. "There's a really good quote from Hippocrates: 'Those who get exhausted with running should wrestle, and those who get exhausted with wrestling should run.'"

Then the Christians came along. They objected to the pagan aspects of the Olympic Games and put their focus on the soul and spirituality, rather than the body. Cathedrals replaced gyms and for centuries, formal exercise wasn't a priority. Not until the post-industrial age, with the birth of concerns about people becoming increasingly sedentary, did physical exercise start to go mainstream.

As well as being a history of physical activity, Sweat is a personal memoir. Hayes writes of growing up the son of a former West Point cadet who trained him like a paratrooper. He recalls later working out in the men-only muscle gyms of San Francisco in the Aids era. And tells of how, later still, Sacks pushed himself to exercise while seriously ill with cancer.