Exercise is essential for your health, but many people don’t like doing it. Here are four easy ways to get motivated to exercise and stay active!
You need to exercise. You know this. You might even want to do it. But wanting to do it and actually doing it are often two very different things. You might intend to do it, but so what? The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. What you need is action. In order to generate action, you need to be motivated. So how do you motivate yourself to actually get off your butt and exercise?
1. Know The End Goal
The most important thing in the motivation department is to know what you want and why. Answering that question often gives you a good amount of fuel for the fire. Did your last doctor’s visit not go so well? Trying to get in shape for a wedding or swimsuit season? If you know you what you want and why you’ve got the beginnings of a spark that can turn into a fire of motivation if you continue fanning the flames.
2. Visualize
After you know what you want, the next step is to see yourself having it. The mind and body connections are super powerful and we’re only beginning to understand them. Close your eyes and see yourself having the body you want to create with the exercise you’re trying to motivate yourself to do. See how you look naked. See how other people react to you.
If you have a specific celebrity or athlete whose physique you’re trying to copy, then plaster pictures of them all over your home or office or bedroom. If they are the first thing you see in the morning and the last thing you see at night, you’ll be that much more motivated to go out and get that body.
3. Break It Down Into Smaller Goals
If you want to bench press 500 pounds and you can’t lift the bar, and all you focus on is benching 500 pounds, you’re going to get really frustrated and upset really fast. But if you break it down into smaller goals, you greatly increase your chances of success and your motivation. Focus on adding say, ten pounds to the bar, then nail that and add another five, and so on and so on.
Likewise if you are really overweight and you need to lose one hundred pounds and you’ve never exercised in your life, it can seem a bit daunting to say the least. If you focus solely on losing the total amount, you won’t get anywhere. Focus on smaller goals like working up to twenty minutes a day on the treadmill, or losing five pounds and keeping it off. Then cross that goal off the list and move to the next one. Wash, rinse, repeat.
4. Implement Your Exercise Plan & Succeed!
This one may seem a bit counter-intuitive, but go with me on this one. It’s a little known fact that Success is the most addictive substance on the planet. Just a little bit of success, no matter how seemingly insignificant can light the fire of motivation you need to exercise. Add one success to another and then another and then another and then you my friend have momentum and when you push that snowball to the top of the hill, it has nowhere to go but down. And as that snowball goes barreling down the hill it becomes a runaway train and then takes on a life of its own and then presto! You have all the motivation you need to exercise!
There you go! You now have four important tips and tricks to help you achieve your exercise goals! You can have all the tools in the world, but at the end of the day only you can make it happen. These are really just a way of helping you answer a very simple yet profound question. How bad do you really want it? If you want it bad enough you can make just about anything happen.