5 Reasons You Can’t Stick With a Workout – and What to Do About It
You exercise for external reasons. Motivation matters, with all sources of motivation existing on a spectrum from extrinsic to intrinsic. “Extrinsic motivation involves external rewards and punishment-motivating behavior,” Carter says. How to alter your mindset: Make it personal. When exercise is 100 percent intrinsically motivated, it is all about the pure pleasure of what you’re doing in that moment, says Mary E. Jung, director of the Health and Exercise Psychology Laboratory at the University of British Columbia. However, as far as exercise adherence is concerned, working out for the simple joy of exercising isn’t always realistic either. That’s why she recommends thinking about your current sources of motivation and how you can move them along the spectrum to be more intrinsic. Your goals take time. Fitness results require time, consistency and patience, while humans prefer immediate rewards, such as the feeling of de-stressing in front of the TV or going out with friends. Even staying late at work comes with the instant gratification of crossing tasks off your to-do list, making it more enticing than the long-term investment of exercise. How to alter your mindset: Write down instant rewards. “To get [the] immediate rewards of exercise, you have to be aware of them; you have to be looking for them,” Jung says. She recommends keeping a gratitude journal to write down the ways in which you benefit from exercise during or after just one workout session. You let other people run your workouts. Having a personal trainer or group fitness instructor can help take a lot of guesswork out of your workouts, but blindly following what someone else says isn’t necessarily helpful toward building a long-term habit, Jung says. How to alter your mindset: Take ownership. If you work with a personal trainer, talk to her about which exercises you like and dislike, and how you take part in the process of planning your workout routine, Jung says. You don’t feel like you’re any good at your workout. A 2003 Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise review found that confidence in one’s exercise ability is the highest predictor of how much a person will exercise.
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