It is very common that when you are starting a new habit, at the beginning you are quite well motivated. You keep doing your tasks, you follow your routines. Everything is fine, till some point where your motivation turns downward and you lose your willingness to continue.
Sometimes it comes very slowly. At first you don’t even notice that you are losing interest and desire to cultivate your habit. From time to time, you skip some steps. Soon, you realize that you are skipping more than you perform, often thinking on how to avoid next points.
Sometimes your motivation drop instantly from sky to ground level. Well, probably it wasn’t your first failure and surely not the last one…
Those patters appear very often when physical activities are concerned. Therefore I listed below best tips to kick your motivation to keep running. Some of them you have never heard about and some you probably have. Either way reading about them can help you get motivated so go on…
- Think over reasons why you want to exercise. Health benefits, releasing stress, sleep improving, decreasing blood pressure, fun and social interactions are all among many others.
- Think over reasons why not to exercise. Is there a good argue not to do this or is it only laziness? No, lack of time is not an explanation. Don’t fool yourself. Don’t become a slave of your laziness and excuses.
- Find activity that you will truly enjoy. If you don’t like your exercises, sooner or later you will drop this habit no matter what. But remember to give it a time. You may not like running during first two weeks, but after two months you will find it pleasant.
- Take one week break from exercises and then start again.
- Change something in your routine. Run in different places, exercise on different time of day, on different days, with different people.
- Change type of activity for some period of time, then return to the previous one.
- Find a friend who will exercise with you. Mutually motivate each other and enjoy time spend together.
- Track your progress. Seeing that you are improving can be very motivating.
- Set short term, mid term and long term goals you want to achieve like distance you want to run or number of pushups to perform in a row. Of course keep tracking your progress and gratitude yourself when you achieve your goal.
- Inspire yourself.
- Keep writing all benefits you experience since starting exercising habit.
- Take a coach. If you pay, you subconsciously motivated because you want to get a good workout for your money.
- Exercise with your favorite, highly energetic music.
- Exercise with soundtrack from your favorite action movie. Imagine that you are the main character. Feel the adrenaline and jump into the action.
- Tell your friends and relatives about your exercise habit. Public statement will keep you obligated to continue exercising.
- Perform a 30-days trial.
- Take a part in competition or find a good competitor. It is always a good motivational stimulus.
- Find energy in your emotions. No matter if it is coming from anger on your boss or excitement flowing from meeting a new, interesting person. Amplify this emotion and turn into physical energy.
- Plan your exercises on busy days with strich schedule and almost no free time. While executing consecutive tasks and activities there is no time to think if you like your next step or you don’t. You simply perform everything what is coming. Put yourself into such state.
- Remember, you are in control. You choose to exercise. You don’t need to do this.
- Stop reading this site and just do it.Now.
photo credit: Ernst Moeksis
