How To Maintain Motivation To Exercise?
How to maintain motivation to exercise
Have you been struggling with keeping up your motivation to stay consistent in your exercising routine? Everyone knows that motivation to exercise is extremely important, but it can be difficult to maintain motivation.
Here are 7 Effective Ways to Maintain Motivation to Exercise
1. Build it into your schedule
One of the most effective ways to stay motivated to exercise is by making sure that you have enough time set aside for working out. By building exercise into your daily routine your motivation for working out tends to increase dramatically. People are more likely to stick with something they work on consistently than something that they only perform sporadically or irregularly.
2. Reward yourself
Another great way of staying motivated is rewarding yourself for working out. Everyone likes some form of motivation whether this being a cheat meal on the weekend or enjoying a few beverages with friends. By giving yourself some sort of reward, motivation levels stay more consistent and tend to increase on their own because your subconscious can see working out as something that has value not just to your appearance but to your mental and physical wellbeing.
3. Do whatever it takes to make exercise fun - find something you love doing!
By making exercise fun, motivation tends to increase dramatically. Find an activity that you like to do (examples: Basketball, Zumba, Puppy yoga!) or try different activities until you find one that you like best this way motivation levels stay relatively high because you actually enjoy what you’re doing.
4. Keep a Health and Fitness journal
Another effective strategy is keeping track of all your successes in a journal, for example recording how many times you worked out each week and how long you worked out before feeling fatigued and not motivated. It may even be good to log your mood and a rough idea of what you have been eating as all these factors can have an effect.
5. Set goals
Make sure that the goals you set for yourself are realistic and are not too demanding to start with. Over time once you’ve started hitting your goals you can start to make them more challenging and give yourself new goals to work towards. By setting these types of goals motivation tends to increase because people tend to work harder at something when they know what they are working towards, rather than just specifically focusing on trying to "get fit".
6. Have a training partner
Having someone to exercise with can increase motivation levels, this is because it may involve friendly competition as neither of you will want to be worse than the other which gives you a little incentive to keep going. Having a partner can also be good for socializing which is known to be beneficial for your mental wellbeing.
7. Stay consistent
People tend to perform better and feel more motivated if they work out on a regular basis than if they only work out sporadically or randomly here and there. By staying consistent motivation increases over time because it becomes part of the routine and people begin to see exercise as something that has great value to their day.
Keeping motivated is extremely important when it comes to exercise because if you’re not enjoying it and feeling good about exercising then most likely you will stop all together. The bottom line is that exercise has great benefits for mental and physical wellbeing long term and if you find something you enjoy that fits into your routine you will look at it as something that benefits you rather than something you have to do.
