Often it’s easier to find motivation when you first start a fitness program than when you’ve been doing it for a while. For some people, workout motivation comes easily and they start to enjoy their exercise sessions. But for most it becomes a chore and they struggle to stick to their programs. So what can you do to maintain your workout motivation?
Set yourself goals
It’s not necessarily helpful to have very specific goals when you start working out. If you’re a complete beginner, it’s better to just focus on getting into the habit of exercising regularly. But once you have got into an exercise habit and know what is realistic, it can be good to have goals to work towards. Some examples of goals you could work towards are:
Physical appearance
Examples of goals are weight loss, changes in body measurements/dress size or increase in muscle definition
Strength or muscular endurance
An example of a strength goal is to deadlift 20kg, while an example of a muscular endurance goal is to do 50 squats.
Health
Health goals could be to bring heart rate and/or blood pressure down.
Flexibility
You could work towards being able to do particular stretches – like these hamstring stretches for example.
Cardio fitness
For example, you could aim to increase the distance you can walk/run or reduce the time you can do it in.
An event
There are always charity walks and runs you can enter to give your training some focus.
Add variety
You need to try new things and change your workouts to stay interested. Even if it’s only small changes, you’ll stay motivated and keep challenging your body. Examples of how you can add variety:
- Do a different fitness challenge each month
- Change your walk/run routes or speed intervals
- Do a different set of exercises – for example if you’re doing a mat work routine for your legs, try some standing work like squats, lunges and high kicks
Do shorter workouts
If you struggle to get motivated for your exercise session, a shorter session might seem more appealing. Workouts don’t have to be a minimum length or cover all aspects of your fitness at once. You might find it easier to motivate yourself to do 15 minutes a day rather than 2 hour long workouts a week for example. Try some of these quick workouts.
Alter your reps and sets
Try fewer reps of harder exercises or more reps of easier exercises for different training effects. Or try patterns like pyramid workouts, where you progress from high reps of easy to low reps of hard and then back down again.
Try out different exercise equipment
You don’t need to build a home gym. There are lots of options for reasonably priced, easily stored equipment, including:
- Exercise bands and tubes
- Stability ball
- Pilates ring
- Jump rope
- Agility ladder
- Fitness step
- Kettlebells
- Body bars
- Ankle weights
- Suspension straps
- Balance board
Schedule and track your workouts
It can be helpful to plan out your workouts, then keep a record of if you do them and if not, the reason for this. In this way, you can build up a picture of what makes you more or less likely to stick to your workout plans and amend your plans accordingly. Get a printable workout tracker here.