How To Find The Motivation For Exercise
How To Find The Motivate Yourself to Work Out
With so much to do in everyday life, demanding jobs, busy kids, endless home errands and so on, finding the motivation for exercise can seem daunting. It’s not always easy to reach for your gym pack and head out of the door—even if you’re well aware of exercise benefits in terms of fitness and health, a lack of time and little niggles can all contribute to making you exercise less than you might desire to.
How to Find Motivation to Exercise
As a result, if you’ve lost your workout motivation, here are a few jedi mind tricks to help you jump-start your drive.
Pretend your way to fitness
Acting as if you’re the kind of a person you want to be helps you become that person faster and easier. This is what is known as the ‘act as if’ principle. A study by the Harvard psychologist Dr Ellen Langer showed that elderly men improved on measures of memory, hearing and strength by just pretending that they’re younger. Another study from the National University of Singapore revealed that subjects were more likely to buy healthy foods when they were asked to behave as if they were motivated.
To put this principle into practice, do the following:
- Get clear on your fitness resolution. Set measurable and realistic goals. Determine the exact step-by-step process you need to follow in order to achieve your desired outcomes.
- Create a vivid a picture of you already achieving the desired results.
- Give yourself complete permission to step into the desired state. See/hear/feel what it’s like to reach your fitness peak.
- Start acting as if you’re that type of person on a daily basis. Make the commitment NOW.
Making it fun
Making your fitness resolution enjoyable is critical—even if you hate exercise the first place. According to many studies and my own experience, sticking with a workout program is far easier when what you’re doing is enjoyable. If it is a drag, you won’t last much. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could make the toughest workouts seem like fun and a lot more enjoyable? Again, this is just another thing you can learn to do.
Here is how to make exercise fun:
- Think of something you really enjoy doing.
- Close your eyes and imagine that enjoyable activity in full detail. See the image inside of your mind clearly, hear the sounds, feel the sensations as they were then.
- Amplify the feelings of enjoyment. You can do this by making the pictures bigger and brighter, and the sounds inside of your mind louder, etc.
- Now imagine your fitness resolution and all the things you need to do as you keep thinking about doing the thing you really enjoy doing.
- Break the state. Go and do something else.
- Repeat the exercise.
These two tricks are simple and straightforward. Nonetheless, real change takes place only when you start the implementation process. Therefore, make sure to take action on what you’ve just learned and keep in mind that the key to long-life success is incremental progress, not perfection.
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