5 Ways to get Motivated to Exercise
New year, new you, right? Except sometimes, motivation just doesn’t want to come to the party. Here are a few ideas to get your butt up and moving every single day.
Change your lingo
Rather than psyching yourself up for ‘exercise’, start with simply moving your body as often as you can. Aim for 30-60 minutes per day and YES walking counts – in fact it’s one of the best ways to lean down, and ramp up your routine again because it’s not intimidating, you can do it anytime, and it’s an incredible mood-booster too.
Score bonus points: add in a few ‘workout snacks’, 5 bite-sized bits of movement like doing a 20 bench squats partway through a walk, keeping a skipping rope handy and doing 100 turns of the rope whenever you’ve been sitting at your desk too long, or try last week’s 5-minute butt workout!
Find your WHY
We love defining the word WHY as how the World is Helped by You. In this case, how is your world being helped by the level of activity you’re doing? If you can link your workouts to your purpose, for example to increase your energy levels for work, be a good role model for your kids, spend more time being active with your partner, or go on fun active adventures with friends – you’ll be more likely to show up and work on your fitness consistently. Keep your reasons front of mind, or write them down and keep them in view.
Score bonus points: sign up to a charity event, like a fun run or race and score more WHY points – help your world by giving yourself something to train for, and help someone else’s world too by supporting a good cause!
Same, same, but different
If you were in a great routine before the holidays, but can’t seem to face walking into the gym again, sometimes what you really need is a change of scenery. Take some time to find a new program or fitness approach that gives you a fresh start and helps you learn a new skill too. A change really does help to inject fresh motivation!
Score bonus points: try something that’s completely out of your comfort zone! Never tried Muay Thai? Heavy weights? A half marathon? Why not throw your hat in the ring ;)
Tribe is everything
Motivating yourself to exercise can be tough, but if you have a tribe of workout warriors you love waiting for you at your workout, it gets a heck of a lot easier. Why? Because we’re social creatures, and we love to share experiences and stories, so showing up for each other is so much easier than showing up for a pair of dumbbells!
Score bonus points: rather than worrying about whether you’re fit enough to join in, flip that mindset and always try to jump into a group where you’re not the fittest person in the room. Chasing someone else in a workout is so much fun and always makes it easier to get a great workout and faster results.
Lock it in Eddie
Sometimes it really helps to sign up to a program that has a clear start and end point. Pay upfront so you won’t back out halfway, put your sessions in your diary as if they were important meetings, then gun it to the finish line! The clarity a short-term program gives you about what you need to do and when to get results is awesome, and it’s a great way to make your commitment public too. Not only that, the power of going through a program with the same people you started with is another way to find your tribe.