I don’t enjoy exercise / cardio / lifting. How can I learn to love it?

This is a common problem, and the best advice we can give is: Stop trying to love the process and love the results instead.

Succinctly, u/purplespengler is fond of saying:

I don’t enjoy cleaning my cat’s litterbox, but I do it anyway because I enjoy my house not smelling like cat shit.

Put more eloquently by a poster from r/weightroom:

Getting good at pretty much anything involves doing boring shit over and over again to make progress. It doesn’t matter what it is. If you want to get good at playing guitar because you love performing on stage you still have to run scales, train your ear, learn music theory, learn that crazy song that your drummer likes even though you hate it, and do various exercises to improve your technical abilities. It doesn’t matter if you find it boring. If you want to be good, you have to do that stuff so you can do the really fun stuff well. And you have to do it in some capacity every day whether you feel like it or not.

Same thing with strength training, or owning a business or anything else. So, yes, you should enjoy your hobbies but, on the other hand, you won’t ever get good at those hobbies unless you’re willing to work hard for years on end at a lot of things you don’t like that are encompassed within that hobby.

If you want to get good results in the realm of fitness, this is something that you’ll have to figure out how to accept and move past. If you let your consistency and effort in your workouts be dictated by how much you enjoy them, you’re not going to get good results.

All that being said, some users have been able to find a balance by compartmentalizing their “training fitness” and their “fun fitness” into separate activities – Going to the gym to train as part of a routine, but also participating in local club / community sports in their spare time to let loose and have a bit of fun while being physically active. This is a good option to explore if it fits within your schedule.