Attention-holding forms of exercise

[Endless luke]

I had a big victory two days ago when I played a game of basketball for the first time in many years. I think that vigorous physical activity is an important part of the recovery process but I had tried running over a year ago and it hadn't helped. I think that running could have worked if I had done it with no reservations but it seems to me that it's a more difficult activity to make work. It's very natural to listen to your body while running. Therefore it may be easier for people to do exercises that have some distracting element (at least in the beginning. Once you have proven to yourself that you can do one type of vigorous activity doing any kind should be easy). In this spirit I'm going to make a short list of how I might group activities.
I think though that this list may vary from person to person since we think about activities differently.

Promote focus on the activity
Team sports and one on one sports- tennis, basketball, racquetball, etc.
Dancing

Promote focus on the body
Running, weight lifting, yoga, aerobics, swimming, bicycling

 

[Forest]

This is an interesting idea. For me the first real strenuous activity I did was play broom ball, which fits in the team sports activity. Having something where you focus on the activity and not the body really helped boost my confidence. You could have also faced the issue where you ran before you were ready. I was rereading a couple of Sarno books this past week, and found it interesting that he told people to engage in physical activity only when their symptoms diminish and they build up their confidence.