So what would I say to you if you possess decent health - but have only exercised intermittently in the past - and asked me to provide a catchy saying to serve as the New Year’s resolution to make your exercise rate this year more consistent?

“Five times 52 for an hour.”

I would say this even though I know the odds of you following it for a full year are poor at best. A 2020 OnePoll survey, for instance, found only 32 percent of New Year’s resolutions survive past January.

But I would do just that with an underlying motive: to initiate a deeper discussion about exercise. One where I’d stress how you can defy the odds and exercise for a lifetime - provided you realize that how you view exercise itself is the key to doing so.

In a blog from 15 years ago, Will Brink, a Harvard grad who’s spent more than 30 years writing about and serving as a consultant to the supplement, fitness, bodybuilding, and weight-loss industries, observes all exercisers are ultimately one of two types. The type you don’t want to be is an “endpoint trainer.”

Endpoint trainers regard exercise only as “a means to an end,” so after the goal is met, the motivation to work out ends. If progress doesn’t come as quickly as they expect, some impatient endpoint trainers even quit before that.

Will Brink advises elite-level bodybuilders and fitness competitors for the most part. Even so, he’s seen these go-getters give up on working out altogether when they don’t have an upcoming show to train for “way too many times to count.”

So if you’re a chauffeur-service mom or a dad-bod dad who will never have a show to train for, how can you be counted on not to crap out on exercise?

It’s not because a cricket’s ears are located on its legs.

That’s a total non-sequitur, I know, but a segue, I hope, that holds your attention.

Because former cricketer Mark Richardson (get it now?), whose ears are where they’re supposed to be and is better known for analyzing the game he once played really well, says, “Right thoughts produce right actions.”

And the right thought to have about exercise is not the one endpoint trainers hold. For Brink, it’s to see exercise “as an important and integrated part of [your] life,” part of a greater process.

He calls guys and gals who do, logically enough, “process trainers.” While Brink’s sentiments are easy to understand, if you’re a chauffeur-service mom, a dad-bod dad - or an intermittent exerciser for any reason - something else might not be.

How to transform a New Year’s resolution like “five times 52 for an hour” into a committed lifestyle, thereby making any further exercise resolutions unnecessary.

It comes with realization. In large part, through two specific ones.

The first being that, regardless of its current shape or capabilities, your body is magnificent and that it does you good to appreciate all it does every day. Like me though, you’re probably at fault for not being appreciative that frequently.

But think about it. Isn’t it an absolute wonder that your heart beats, your lungs breath - that you still remember the lyrics from a song you heard a few times one way-back summer seemingly a lifetime ago?

So why in the world wouldn’t you want to exercise frequently when it’s been shown repeatedly to enhance all the body’s functions and increase the amount of time the body sufficiently performs them? If you say it’s due to a lack motivation, you need to come to a second realization.

That your lack motivation is linked to a lack of something else: action.

Ultra-endurance athlete Rich Roll - author of six health and fitness books and host of a podcast so popular it’s usually part of iTunes top-10 list - argues that most people have cause and effect backwards in this case. That being in a good mood does not create the motivation that leads to action, but that being in action creates the other two.

According to my experience, Roll speaks the truth.

Many mornings as I sit and write, the prospect of the impending workout is not a pleasant one. I’ll feel sluggish, less than inspired, and sometimes even a bit sore.

When that’s the case, I cut this deal with myself.

Just do the warm up and five minutes of the workout. If you’re still as sluggish, sore, and unmotivated as before, you can stop.

But after 40-plus years of such deal making, I can honestly say I’ve never ended stopped at the five-minute mark. While I have reduced a workout’s intensity or its duration, it’s because, ironically enough, the feedback from the early part of the workout has created its own motivation.

To do what’s best on this day to keep me exercising every day - thereby eliminating the need for any future New Year’s resolutions.