It’s easy to plan to work out, but actually doing it is something else altogether. Before you know it, you have laundry to do, groceries to buy, a job to go to (and maybe even bring home with you), and social obligations that you want to keep. Fitness can easily get lost among all of your commitments and responsibilities. The following advice should help you to follow through on your exercise plans and to make the most of your motivation. You can do it!
Start Early
You think about waking up early and exercising when you are lying in bed at night, but that alarm starts blaring and rolling over for another hour of sleep feels more important. But, research demonstrates women who work out early are more likely to stick with their workouts than women who do not.
Every minute later in your day that you plan to work out is a minute that something else could crop up. That doesn’t typically happen first thing. If you aren’t a morning person, it is time to become one. Getting your fitness taken care of before anything else starts everyday out with a feeling of success. Use the idea of that success to motivate you. Just like in heroin abuse, treatment for heroin addiction tends to be most effective when heroin abuse is caught early on.When you hear the alarm begin calling for you to rise up, imagine yourself after your workout, feeling proud of yourself and a little relieved that it is all over.
Focus on Larger Muscles
If you have a limited amount of time for fitness, you should get more efficient by doing exercises that most contribute to strength gains. This means you should be doing the big four: push-ups, squats, planks, and lunges. You should be doing them one after another in a circuit and repeating it three to four times before you take a break.
Get a Gym Locker
If you are getting your workout done early in your day, you are probably showering and getting ready for your day at the gym. This means that you are hauling workout clothes and make up, and hair styling products/tool with you every day. That can eat away at your motivation because it makes working out harder. Get a locker at your gym and keep the things that you need there. It means you don’t have to figure out how to get a workout in.
Find a Fitness Partner
Research has shown that people who have a workout buddy are more likely to get to the gym regularly. But, you shouldn’t be looking to your best friends to do this with you. When you are close with someone, they understand when you back out or make excuses. You can blow them off with a quick text. But, if the partner you choose is some you know but not someone you are terribly close with, you will feel more obligation to arrive on time for scheduled workouts.
Plan Your Workouts
People who change their diet to lose weight are most successful when they keep a food journal and track what they eat. You would do well to plan your workouts in advance and post them where you can see them. Like the food journal, this advance planning makes you think about what you are doing and commit to doing the right thing. Without your routine somewhere where you encounter it regularly, it can be easy to ignore or forget.
A fun way to approach this is to use notecards or post-its to plan each workout. When you complete it, you can throw the plan directly into the garbage. This helps you to feel like you have accomplished something and that gives you a feeling of success that can keep you motivated.
