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Most returnees get less active within six months and cannot work out why. The reasons are structural, and so are the fixes.
Here is a pattern nobody expects. People arrive from cities where they walked to the station, walked at lunch, walked to the shop, and within six months they have lost fitness they did not know they were maintaining.
Nothing went wrong. The walking was never exercise. It was infrastructure, and you left it behind.
You drive now, or you are driven. There is no station to walk to. Pavements are inconsistent or absent, and where they exist the traffic beside them makes walking unpleasant rather than pleasant.
The heat and humidity mean the outdoor exercise you did casually at home now needs planning: early morning or evening, and real hydration.
Air quality in parts of Lagos, particularly near heavy traffic, is worth taking seriously if you are exercising outdoors and breathing hard for an hour. Check conditions rather than assuming, and if you have asthma in the household, factor it into where you live as well as when you run.
And there is a status problem, which people rarely say out loud. Walking somewhere you could be driven reads, to some, as a signal about means. That social pressure is subtle and it works on people who would swear it does not.
None of this is a reason to give up. It is a reason to be deliberate, because the thing that used to be automatic no longer is.
Early morning, genuinely early. Between five and seven is cooler, quieter, safer and full of other people doing the same thing. It is the single best window and it requires going to bed earlier, which is the actual difficulty.
Estate and closed loops. Running inside your estate or a gated area removes the traffic and safety questions in one move. It is repetitive and it is reliable, and reliable beats interesting.
Gyms are good and getting better, particularly around Lekki, VI and Ikoyi. Budget for it as a real line item rather than an afterthought. Air conditioning is not a luxury here, it is what makes training possible at four in the afternoon.
Swimming, if your estate or club has a pool, is the one form of exercise the heat actively helps with.
Home equipment, if your schedule is unpredictable or you work remotely across time zones. A mat, adjustable dumbbells and a pull-up bar remove every excuse involving traffic. Traffic is the excuse that ends most fitness plans here.
Do it with other people.
This is the overlap with the harder problem of making friends as a returning adult. Adult friendship needs repetition and a shared reason to be in the same place at the same time, and there is no better generator of that than a standing appointment to do something physical badly.
A running group that meets at six on Saturdays. A five-a-side game with the same eight men every week. A gym where the same faces appear at the same hour. A padel or tennis ladder. A boxing class.
The fitness is the excuse. The repetition is the point. Six months of turning up to the same thing produces friendships that six months of dinners and networking will not, because nobody is performing and everybody is slightly out of breath.
For returnees working remotely for foreign employers, this is close to essential rather than optional. You have removed the two structures that give most adults their social life, an office and a commute, and replaced them with a room in your house. Something with a fixed time and other humans in it is the counterweight.
Acclimatise properly. Give yourself a few weeks before attempting what you used to do at your old intensity. The heat is a real physiological load and pretending otherwise is how people end up unwell in week two.
Hydrate more than feels necessary, with water you have verified is safe. This is a solved problem, but solve it deliberately rather than assuming.
Food is not the obstacle people expect. Nigerian food built around vegetables, beans, fish and moderate portions is genuinely good eating. What tends to creep in is the volume of soft drinks and the frequency of eating out, particularly in the first months when nobody has established a routine.
Do not train alone in unfamiliar places at unfamiliar hours, especially at first. Ask locally where people run. There is always an answer, and it is usually a specific route at a specific time with a specific crowd.
You will not maintain fitness here by accident, because the accidental version was built into a city you no longer live in. You will maintain it by deciding on a thing, at a time, with people.
Do that and you solve two of the three problems returnees actually struggle with, health and loneliness, with one standing appointment.
Ask us where people actually run and train in the area you are considering. It is a smaller question than housing and it changes daily life more than people expect.