Need Motivation To Exercise? Try These 15 Tips
Getting fit might not tickle your fancy, especially at the start. At times, it can feel like you’re in a bit of a pickle, almost like going through a torture session. When you hit that wall, throwing in the towel seems like the easy way out rather than soldiering on.
However, exercising becomes interesting with time. The more you adapt to the exercise, the better you feel. You become self-driven, and you desire to get better achievements.
When you are serious about your exercise, it is rewarding. The benefits you get from exercising are better than the risks involved in a poor lifestyle.
The following are some tips to motivate you through your exercises:
Set Goals
Goals act as a roadmap on what you want to achieve from your workout. Exercising is not specific, and you have to decide what you seek from doing it.
After choosing to undergo exercise, the next step should be setting goals. They may vary from one individual to the next. What matters is how specific you are to your goals.
Goals help you assess your progress against your achievements (1).
When setting goals, make sure you are realistic. You should not try and be a superhero on your first exercise. That would be straining yourself which can cause you more harm than good. The whole idea of exercising is to bring positive changes, not negative.
Your goals should not only appear in books. You should be able to achieve them. If not, it is time to review them. They are not helping you.
You will be wasting your time and energy to accomplish nothing.
Consider getting help in reviewing your goals. A second eye can help in pointing loopholes in your goals.
Join Exercising Groups
You may choose to join a community group, a professional group or form one with friends. There is strength in working from a group.
When you join an exercising group, your success rate is high. Why? You do not want to be left behind when the rest of the group is accomplishing an achievement.
Exercising groups help you to be disciplined. You cannot afford to miss a single exercise. You can get these groups from your local area since a lot of people work out daily. They have different drives, and it is easy to spot a group with the same motive as yours.
The secret of having a successful group is in finding one that has people with the same goals as yours. You can share your challenges with such groups, and members help you overcome them.
Reward Yourself After Every Achievement
Achieving the first goal is usually never easy. It requires a lot of sacrifice from you. You forego some of the things you love most.
The best way to help you continue exercising is by rewarding yourself. Rewards should be simple and affordable.
Breaking your workload to small achievable milestones make it more successful. It helps you to be organized and take one bit at a time (2).
Each time you achieve a milestone, sit back and treat yourself with what you love most. However, you should keep in mind that the reward is only occasional. You can have someone close to you help you measure your achievements and approve the rewards. Share with them your success.
According to studies, when we reward ourselves, we trigger the production of endorphins. We feel good about ourselves and look forward to doing more to get better recognition.
Our brains are like babies. When there is a reward, they work hard to achieve the set goal to get that reward. They do not put the same effort when there is nothing after the accomplishment.
Set The Right Attitude For Your Training
Attitude defines your overall exercising outcome. When you start with a positive attitude towards your training, you will enjoy the whole experience.
However, when all you do is find fault in your exercise, you make it lose its meaning. You become very good at postponing and getting excuses not to do the exercise.
The best way to set the right attitude is to keep off the negative minded people. Get a company that appreciates exercising.
A positive attitude can make you achieve more than you ever imagined.
Do Not Be Hard On Yourself
It is okay to fail but not okay to remain fallen. Once in a while, you will set goals and fail to achieve.
That is fine. You should have a flexible mind that will help you overcome the failure. Having a flexible mind enables you to get solutions to failure.
You should learn from what made your attempt fail and make sure it doesn’t recur.
When you are hard on yourself, you will become demotivated for fear of failing on the next attempt.
Give yourself time to relax. It helps in clearing your mind and get you ready for your next task.
Importance Of Motivation While Exercising
Motivation is a significant determiner of the success of our exercises. Its role cannot be underestimated. We all want to be motivated at some point. The following are some importance of motivation while exercising:
It Helps Us Achieve Our Goals
When we are motivated, it is easy to achieve our goal. We understand the importance of the exercise and the impacts of the training on us.
Motivation helps us own the exercise. We do it for us. Not because anybody is watching, but because we want to achieve something.
We become accountable in ourselves and withhold exercising discipline. It is easy to look forward to the next exercise when we are motivated (3).
The results are achieving goals and milestones. Motivation creates a cycle of happiness due to continuous achievements.
It Makes Exercising Interesting
When you do something and find it fun and interesting, you are likely to repeat it more often. When you have a source of motivation, you will always find something interesting about your exercising.
It does not have to be something huge. Simple things can cause a difference. According to studies, when you are motivated, you tend to trigger the production of endorphins.
Endorphins make you excited. When you are excited, you will find exercising fun and entertaining to do.
It Helps Us Monitor Our Progress
It is not surprising to find a person carrying exercises without monitoring their progress. They do it to finish rather than get results.
That is a clear sign that such a person lacks motivation. However, if we are motivated, we are interested in finding out more.
We want to know whether we are getting the impact of the exercise. We want to see if we are meeting our goals and what we need to change to improve our performance.
Motivation and monitoring our progress go hand in hand and are almost impossible to separate.
It Helps Us In Setting Higher Goals
When we are motivated, we are not satisfied with our achievements. It is not like we get disappointed on achieving them, but we feel encouraged to do better.
There is always room for improvement. Motivation makes us set higher goals than the previous. It creates a feeling that makes us want to go as far as our imaginations take us.
We become more efficient than before and reaching a better target become our lifestyle.
It Helps Create A Positive Exercising Environment
Once you are motivated to exercise, you get attracted to people of the like mind. You always want to associate yourself with people that challenge your exercises.
As a result, you do not have time to listen to those who have a negative mind. You will always focus on how to outdo your group members.
You will always set time to look at the drawbacks of your exercise. A positive exercising environment eliminates all the impossibilities to create room for achievements.
When you are motivated, you can create a list that contains a list of what to do and what not to do. You will adhere to it as it gives you an enabling environment.
It Helps To Enhance Commitments
You understand you have other responsibilities which need your attention. Motivation enables you to increase effort in exercising.
Each time you are about to quit, motivation reminds you why you started. Whether you do it to become fit, for medical reasons or to cut weight, you remember.
Motivation helps you understand exercising is a commitment to yourself. It creates enthusiasm in honoring your exercising commitments.
It Helps Maintain Consistency
It is easy to lose focus especially when there are competing interests. You can be tempted to forego your exercises and attend an event.
When you are motivated, results matter to you, and you would not want to miss activity in your schedule. One achievement usually unfolds a new goal.
Since you set those goals and had a second eye to approve them, you would not want to miss your target.
You would also not want to miss the rewards you get after achieving a milestone. All these factors make you consistent on your exercises when put into consideration. Of course, when motivation takes control.
It Helps Us Boost Our Self-Esteem
Nothing is as humiliating as failing to achieve your goals. It makes you feel like a total failure especially when you had involved a third party in your schedule.
In the eyes of your helper, you look as if you are not serious in what you are doing. You appear to be wasting time and lacking a sense of direction.
You look as if you are doing what others are doing and you do not know why they do it. It affects how you feel about yourself (4).
Motivation helps change the outcome. You get to achieve most of your goals which make you feel good about yourself. You feel like a winner, and that is a booster to your self-esteem.
It Helps In Improving Our Social Circles
The idea of exercising makes us feel excited. We rush to sharing it with our friends and relatives, most of the time.
All of them feel happy for us and wish us the best. Some do not stop there. They do a follow up with how we are doing, and we become closer to them than before.
When we fail in our exercises, we start withdrawing from them. We don’t want them to see the failure in us. We are not motivated.
On achieving a few goals, we want our friends to celebrate with us. It feels motivating. This achievement gives us confidence even in reaching out to other people doing exercises even for a different reason than others.
We feel good when sharing our achievements on a social level. We do not feel shy to say hi to people along the corridors. We also don’t mind slowing down when we get a group of friends along the way for a chat.
Motivation is crucial in our exercises. We can find it in different ways such as from friends or from rewarding ourselves. We should find it every time we want to exercise. It is a factor that is wonderworking.