Being able to maintain a workout regimen in the long-run is the foundation for achieving any fitness goals you may have; no matter what you do at the gym, you won’t see progress if you don’t do it frequently and consistently. While you can actively work to generate and maintain consistency in the beginning, working out should ultimately become something you do without requiring any conscious effort or thought. In this post, I want to help you achieve that by sharing some tips on how to make working out a habit that’ll stick with you for the rest of your life.
A lack of motivation and failure to stay consistent are the most common reasons why people aren’t able to reach their fitness goals. Therefore, once going to the gym is an ingrained habit, you’ve overcome one of the most difficult parts of beginning a fitness routine. You won’t have to force yourself to go to the gym every day or fear that you’ll eventually lose the motivation, because exercise will be something you partake in every day without even thinking. At that point, you’ll be able to focus more on what you’re actually doing in the gym and how to progress towards your goals.
If getting to the gym every day is still a constant struggle, here are some ways you can gradually overcome this hurdle and never have to worry about it again.
Work Out at the Same Time Every Day
In addition to working out almost every day, I’d first suggest you also try to work out at the same time every day, as that can make it significantly easier to develop a habit.
Like with most other habits in your life, such as brushing your teeth or eating lunch, you likely perform these actions at around the same time each day. Timing greatly helps with forming and reinforcing habits because eventually, your brain automatically tells your body what to do based on the time of day or the sequence of events that have just occurred.
The same thing will gradually happen when you exercise at the same time each day. Over time, your brain will naturally sense when you should be heading to the gym. This could be based on the time of day if, for example, you always working out first thing in the morning, or based on a sequence of events, like if you always go to the gym after you leave work.
Either way, the result is that you’ll find yourself going to the gym because that’s just what you’re used to doing during that part of the day.
Start with a Simple but Structured Routine
When you first start working out, what you do during your workout isn’t all that important, because the main focus is just to get used to doing something. Don’t stress about immediately formulating the most effective routine to reach your goals, because not only is that impractical, the effort you put into such an endeavor will most certainly overwhelm you. Instead, as I mention in my post What You Should Know on Your First Day at the Gym, start by building a simple routine of exercises that are easy to perform and that you actually enjoy doing.
Even if it’s very basic, having any routine that can provide some sort of structure for your workouts is better than having none at all. When you have some sort of workout plan, even a very rough one, going to the gym can quickly become routine, since you’re just following a schedule of workouts that you’ve previously performed and are accustomed to. By contrast, when every upcoming training session is a complete mystery, you need to put in a lot more active effort to stick to an exercise routine.
Exactly how basic can your routine be? It can be as simple as a list of 3-4 exercises you perform every time you’re at the gym. This can be enough to help you turn working out into a habit, because when you’re feeling particularly unmotivated to go to the gym, just remember that all you have to do is replicate what you did the day before. It was quick and easy, and you probably felt quite good afterwards, so why wouldn’t you do it again?
Pack Your Gym Bag the Night Before
Often times, even the smallest things can derail our motivation and prevent us from doing what we originally set out to do. In the case of working out, if you’re already tired and rather reluctant to exercise, something as minute as having to take the time and effort to pack your gym bag might be the tipping point that causes you to skip that day altogether.
A solution to this is to pack your gym bag the night before. Pack your workout clothes, workout accessories, and pre-workout or protein shake so that when it comes time to hit the gym the following day, all you need to do is grab your bag and go. This makes going to the gym an effortless process.
Although it might seem like a rather insignificant modification, what you’re doing is removing a potential opportunity for obstacles to arise and disrupt the consistency you’re trying to develop.
Take Your Gym Bag to Work
Building off the previous suggestion, you can take it a step further by bringing your gym bag, which you packed the night before, with you the next morning to work, school, or wherever else you need to be during the day.
Maybe the breaking point isn’t when you come home in the evening and realize you still have to pack everything for the gym; it’s simply when you come home. The thought of winding down and relaxing for the rest of the day might be more a lot more appealing than having to leave the house again and expend more energy.
You can eliminate this problem by bringing your gym bag to work and going directly to the gym afterwards. No need to first stop at home, which means no chance of competing priorities and temptations getting in the way of your workout.
Prioritize Showing Up
As I said earlier, any routine is better than no routine when it comes to developing a fitness regimen. However, if you’re still in the process of forming your initial workout plan, or if you’re very reluctant to follow your regular training for some reason, just focus on continuing to show up to the gym. When you’re at the gym on those particular days, you can do an abbreviated workout, a quick cardio session, or even nothing at all and immediately go back home, but no matter what, make it a point to still be there.
Motivation comes and goes; this is a fact that won’t change no matter how long you’ve been working out or how experienced of a lifter you are. However, habits aren’t built from motivation; they’re built from consistency, and only by continuing to reinforce the act of going to the gym will you develop enough consistency for that to happen.
I understand that this suggestion can be hard to implement, as forcing yourself to do something when you don’t want to is never an easy task. However, as much as I want to provide tips and tricks to make every part of your fitness journey easy and exciting, there are times when all you have to rely on is your own discipline and willpower. Fortunately, I can assure you that none of this upfront effort you put in will go to waste, as it’ll heavily pay off in the long-run once exercising becomes an activity that’s fully integrated into your life.
All Habits Die Hard, Even the Good Ones
When you’re just starting a fitness routine, going to the gym will often feel like a burden and something you really have to muster up the energy for. However, if you remain dependent on motivation to force yourself into working out every day, that’s not a sustainable approach for anyone in the long-run.
For people who manage to sustain their routines, it’s not because they’re able to find daily motivation to work out; it’s because they’ve been able to turn working out into a daily habit that they engage in without needing to convince or force themselves to. Along with all the other habitual actions in their everyday life, they continue going to the gym because that’s what they’re used to doing, no matter how much motivation they have, how busy their lives are, and what other challenges they might come across.
Forming a habit out of working out is so crucial because not only does maintaining a fitness regimen become so much easier, but it also means that when you skip a day, you’ll be right back at it the next. If work or travel forces you to spend an extended period away from the gym, instead of causing you to start slacking more often, it’ll only make you that much more excited to get back to it. In other words, while exercise starts out as something that’s very hard to keep up, once it turns into a habit, it becomes very hard to let go.
