The following Mark's Daily Apple articles were written by Mark's systems

and are narrated by Brock Armstrong.

Welcome to Mark's Daily Apple Best of 2014, Volume 2, Exercise and Performance. Featuring, do your workouts feel like a chore?

Improve your workouts with like a chore?

Evolution tends to reinforce healthy, beneficial behaviors that improve the survival of members of a species by making them enjoyable. Sex, sleep, socializing,

and animal fat either feel good, taste good, or sometimes feel and taste good at the same time.

Not just because, but because they are necessary components of a healthy, reproductive lifestyle.

And it's not just the act that feels good. Evolution

has also reinforced the anticipation of the behavior. At the prospect of sex, we become aroused,

horny, Randy, or whatever you want to call the pleasure of anticipation. Those long, delicious

yawns that herald the surge of melatonin and promise excellent

sleep as we slip beneath the cool covers with a good book, nothing better. And I still get happy

stomach butterflies when friends are coming for dinner and the scent of crackling porkskins fills the

kitchen. Okay, but what about exercise? There's the endorphin and endocannabinoid

high from exercising intensely, but that exists to keep us moving during an activity as we near the

physiological breaking point. It doesn't get us off our butts in the first place. If exercise is so

good for us, and it is, why doesn't everyone

crave it? Why does it feel like a chore? Why do many people dread it so much? Here's the thing.

Exercise wasn't always optional. If we didn't chase down the antelope, we wouldn't have dinner.

If we didn't climb that 40-foot acacia tree, our glycogen-starved muscles wouldn't get the honey. If we didn't make the six-mile

walk to the spring, we wouldn't have water to drink. We had to do these exercises if we wanted to

survive on a day-to-day basis. There was no, oh, I'll just sit

...