Why You Should Change Your Exercise Routine—And How To Do It

T he alarm clock blares, and you reach for your running shoes without thinking about it. Next thing you know, you're jogging through your neighborhood on the same route as every other morning.

You are a creature of exercise habit. And there's nothing wrong with that—in fact, you're much healthier because of it. "The best exercise is the one you will do," says Stella Volpe, a professor of exercise and nutrition at Virginia Tech.

Science points to the best reasons to break up with a dissatisfying routine and how to switch to a new one.

Change is hard. It takes time and entails risk that the new workout won't work out, possibly turning a bored exerciser into a non-exerciser.

But people can reduce the risk by keeping their go-to workout, while connecting it to a new one. For example, someone who uses an elliptical for 40 minutes every day could stay with that machine, but stop at 20 minutes to bike around town (or on a stationary one at the gym) for the remaining minutes. This "chunking" strategy is effective at making your new workout as automatic to perform as the older one, because the mind unconsciously links the two activities, says Phillippa Lally, a senior lecturer at the University of Surrey in England, who has written about this phenomenon.

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