Why Do People Get Out of Shape? - Routine Excellence

Why Do People Get Out of Shape_

Why do people get out of shape?

Look at some of these comments from people who used to be in great shape:

“Was on the soccer team, captain of basketball and volleyball teams at school. Every weekend before going out we’d rent a pitch and play soccer before any outing. University came along, people became lazy and started smoking, me included, kept same eating habits but no exercise to combat those habits.”

“I got a desk job. Honestly, I love my job, and everything that comes with it. But when I was in college I was able to go to the gym for 5 or 6 days a week. Right now, I’ve been working full time for almost 4 years and it fucked my body up! Currently working on getting back in shape, but I have difficulty going 3 times a week now.”

“Eating and drinking like an animal + college rugby = fit. Eating and drinking like an animal + desk job = fat.”

“One of the really nasty things about being really athletic when you’re younger, is that you never learn to eat properly to maintain weight…You always have it in your head that you’ll just exercise it off. Few thousand extra calories? No biggie.”

Comments like this are incredibly common. In this case, I pulled them from a popular thread on Reddit—which I was pointed to by fellow fitness writer John Fawkes—but I’ve had many similar conversations with people both online and in person.

There are a lot of formerly active people that get out of shape.

At the same time, we’ve all seen those people who seem indestructible, even as they age. The last time I went to a pickup ultimate frisbee game, a guy was there who must have been in his 50s—but he was totally ripped. He came with his son, and was tearing it up on the field.

Even just at the gym, if you look around on an average day you’re likely to see at least one person that age hasn’t managed to touch.

You don’t even need to be that old. For a lot of people, the trigger that leads to getting out of shape is a change in routine. You’ll often see people get out of shape after:

Graduating high school
Graduating college
Starting a new job
Moving to a new city
Getting into a relationship
Having kids

Why does this happen? Why do people—especially former athletes—get out of shape? How do some people keep astonishingly healthy?

And of course, how can you get back in shape?

Before we get to those questions, I wanted to share my personal favorite comment from the Reddit thread.

“I was an incredibly active, athletic person up through my early 20s. I struggled to keep weight on. I ate whatever I wanted and as much of it as I wanted and was still really skinny. I was like a bottomless pit on legs.”

When I was in high school my dad used to call me “the bottomless pit.” I could eat massive amounts of food incredibly quickly.

But by the time I graduated college, I realized that I needed to be more careful about what I ate. I gained 20 pounds in the 6 months after graduating.

Getting back on track took a careful look at how my eating habits had changed. I lost that weight and gradually gained 10 more pounds (of muscle) through careful eating and lifting.

The 4 Types of Fit People that Stop Working Out

In my experience, there are four types of fit people who get out of shape:

Former athletes who stop working out
Active people who move to desk jobs
People who get injured
People who stop working out without changing their eating habits

Yes, there can be some overlap in categories. And category four is something of a catch-all that covers a variety of major life changes.

But in general, these four categories hold true. Let’s look at each one in turn.

Former athletes who stop working out

Like the soccer or rugby player above, these are people who used to be active in the context of a team.

Sometimes these people have been active for their entire lives, starting with peewee sports and little league. Almost always, these people played at least one sport in either high school or college.

And then they stop.

The former athlete that gets out of shape usually gets out of shape because they’ve stopped playing their sport. After graduating, or even just moving away from a rec league, the athlete no longer has a familiar way to be active.

But wait. If someone has been active for their entire life, they wouldn’t just stop? Would they?

They might, if the context, habits, and environment change enough.

When you’re part of an athletics program, you’re a member of a team. You don’t have to guess about what workouts should be doing. You don’t have to spend a lot of energy motivating yourself. You have a team for that. If anything, you work to motivate your teammates.

Being part of a program like that is great (and I advocate it)—but it doesn’t actually teach you how to work out.

As an athlete, you might learn a few different conditioning workouts. You might know some drills, and you might have a strength program to do in the gym.

But you don’t really learn how to build a program for yourself. You just have a checklist to work through.

That works well when you’re actually on the team. It works well for the coach, who can make sure that everyone is spending some time in the gym.

But it makes it harder for the athletes to work out after leaving the team behind. Even though they’ve been active their entire lives, former athletes suddenly need to figure everything out all over again.

And, often, they don’t. Many stop working out entirely after they leave the team environment. So they get out of shape.

Active people who move to desk jobs

The transition to a desk job usually takes place in one of two ways:

Someone has graduated from school, where they could be active, and starts a new job
Someone with an active job switches to a desk job

Working a desk job doesn’t inherently cause you to gain weight or get out of shape. But it does significantly change your environment. A lot of the activity you used to be doing—even the movement you did without realizing, like walking—disappears.

If you used to spend a lot of time walking across campus to class, a desk job replaces a lot of that time with sitting.

Also, it’s often easier to work out as a student than it is in a standard 9-5 job. Even if the workload is the same, the more flexible student schedule makes it easier to sneak in a workout somewhere throughout the day.

At the other end, people switching from active jobs often underestimate just how active those jobs were.

If you work as a server in a restaurant, you’re spending most of your time up and moving around on your feet. If your job is to coordinate events, you may spend long hours running back and forth to set everything up.

Then switch to a desk job. Suddenly, all of that activity has disappeared—and you might not realize it right away.

People who get injured

“My knees decided not to knee anymore.”

I won’t spend a ton of time on this one, because it’s pretty straightforward: if you get injured, it’s harder to work out.

Some injuries really are debilitating. If you have a major injury that makes walking difficult, working out can be almost a foregone conclusion.

But there’s a whole spectrum of injury severity, and all types of injuries come with their own challenges.

If you like to run, but get a knee injury, it’s easy to give up working out. If you like to lift and hurt your shoulder, your workouts are going to be really limited. If you have a back injury, you could be limited to just walking.

As awful as injuries can be, there are often situations where you can work around them. Maybe your knee responds better to cycling or yoga. Maybe there’s physical therapy you can do for your back.

Even when it is possible to do some kind of workout, it can be hard. People with injuries deal with all of the same challenges to consistency and motivation—but they also have to deal with the limitations of their injuries.

Because of that, a lot of people who get injured stop working out. And get out of shape.

People who stop working out without changing their eating habits

This final category is something of a catch-all—and it isn’t mutually exclusive with the other categories either.

Let’s take another look at one of the simplest, but most insightful, comments from that Reddit thread.

“Eating and drinking like an animal + college rugby = fit. Eating and drinking like an animal + desk job = fat.”

This is an extremely common experience. As our lives progress and we start picking up new responsibilities, sometimes exercise falls by the wayside.

Even if we do exercise, we aren’t always working out as often or as intensely as we used to.

But anyone who has been super active has at times been a big eater. I know there was a point in my life when I was able to down two Chipotle burritos in a single sitting—without worrying about weight—because working out so much gave me an appetite.

Then you take away the workouts. But you keep the appetite. Suddenly, things start to change.

The story appears all over the place. I had an old martial arts instructor—a really active guy—who said “I eat so much when I’m training. But when I’m not training, I still eat like I’m training.”

Once you’ve established a food habit, it can be hard to change—even if the rest of your life no longer supports the habit.

How can you get back into shape?

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably thinking “ok, all that is great. But it doesn’t tell me how to get back in shape after a long break.”

You’re right. It doesn’t. So let’s tackle that now.

First, it’s important to look at what makes this situation unique—and why it causes unique challenges. If you used to work out a lot, you aren’t starting from scratch. You have experience working out, and you know what it feels like to be fit [link].

That can be helpful—you probably have some useful knowledge that you can use.

But it can also cause problems.

The biggest mistake once-fit people make

There’s one challenge that tends to be relatively unique to formerly fit people, and it tends to be mostly psychological.

It can be summed up in 5 words.

“Why is this so hard?”

If you used to be in great shape, you know what it feels like to be able to do hard things. Maybe you used to be able to bang out a dozen pull-ups—but now struggle to do more than one.

Or maybe you used to be able to run a 15-minute 5k—but now struggle to run more than a mile.

For former athletes and fit people, this can be enormously frustrating. It’s easy to think “I used to do this all the time,” and use that as a justification to jump right into really challenging, technical workouts.

Which, unfortunately, can cause injuries.

I’ve seen this happen for all kinds of different people. From former dancers to football players to runner to weekend warriors—it’s frustrating to take what seems like a massive step back when you’re trying to get back into shape.

Unfortunately, taking that step back is important. Fortunately, progressing slowly can help you get back into shape in the long run—even if it feels like your turtling along at first.

How to scale up your workouts over time

In addition to the frustration of not being able to work out as hard, formerly fit people face the challenge of working out in a new context.

When you try to get back into shape—especially as a former athlete—you no longer have the context of a team to lean on.

That means you need to start over. You need to build habits from scratch—which may not be something you have experience doing.

I’ve written extensively about the psychology of habits, as well as about what you should do on your first day at the gym. Those articles can help you dig deeper into developing your new habits.

But there are also some things you can keep in mind for this specific situation, of trying to get back in shape after a long break.

Start small. Start with the easy versions of exercises and scale up slowly. You’ll be less likely to get hurt—and seeing progress over time is more motivating than jumping in and failing right away (which gets frustrating).
Impose restraints. Don’t trust yourself to stay small. A lot of athletes like working hard—and in the middle of a workout you might be tempted to push harder when you really shouldn’t. Go to the gym with a plan that limits you to specific sets, reps, and weights—so you don’t make the wrong decision on the fly
Build habits into your lifestyle. When you try to get back into shape, it’s tempting to go to the gym whenever you can make the time. That makes it hard to stay consistent over the long term. Instead, start by setting up a regular, scheduled time to work out—even if it’s only a couple times a week at first.

Conclusion: Why People Get Out of Shape

There are a few different reasons that formerly fit people get out of shape.

Context changes. Habits change. Lives change.

After you’ve gotten out of shape, you’re in something of a unique position. Your challenges are different from the ones that most people experience when they try to work out—and there are traps that it’s easy to fall into.

By restricting yourself to smaller, incremental improvements—and building new habits into your lifestyle—you can get back into shape even after a long time away from exercise.