- Find an anchor
Attach your exercise routine to an existing habit or activity. This is known as anchoring.
Examples:
1) if you commute to and from work each day, consider cycling or running your commute.
2) do 10 push ups when you brush your teeth in the morning, and 10 squats when you brush them in the evening.
Even if you forget every other tip in this piece, remember anchoring.
- Put in the prep
This is about making it easier to exercise than to avoid exercising. If you plan to run the next morning, lay your clothes out on the floor the night before …or even sleep in your running clothes.
If you plan to go cycling, ensure that your bicycle is clean and well maintained, so that there’s no barrier between wanting to go cycling and pedalling down the road.
- Establish accountability or community
While exercise can often be personal, making it visible to others can help.
Join a club, so that you’re motivated to show up and see your club mates. For more competitive clubs, showing up regularly may be key to demonstrating your commitment.
In a similar vein, find a friend (or friends) and plan to exercise together. This can be even more motivating than joining a club, because they might exercise solo – or not at all – if you don’t show up.
Join Strava, so that others can see what you’re doing, and encourage you.
- Start small and/or slow
When developing a regular exercise routine, forget about heroic workouts and aim for something you can easily achieve daily.
Doing 20 push ups a day for several months is preferable to doing 100 push ups a day for three days, then none.
Jogging five kilometres five days a week for six months could be absolutely transformative, even if you’re only moving at a gentle, conversational pace. By contrast, running far or fast can quickly lead to injury and irregularity.
- Have fun
In the words of Mary Poppins, “a spoon full of sugar makes the medicine go down.” Which is to say: choose an activity that you genuinely find enjoyable.
Too many people seem to consider exercise to be a bitter medicine. While it’s true that there can be self-imposed discomfort and that exercise benefits one’s health, I would recommend ensuring that the taste of the “sugar” overwhelms the taste of the “medicine.”
If you are running, do not turn every session into a sufferfest. Go slowly, look at the views or what’s going on around you, feel the sun or rain on your skin, and smile.
This way, you will look forward to getting out the door rather than dreading it, and you won’t be counting down the seconds until you can stop.
Bonus: in the early stages of developing a regular exercise routine, you will be more injury prone. This is a good reason to take it easy and build slowly.
At the start, your improvement in performance could be rapid. This is great for motivation, but you should anticipate reaching a plateau. When you reach that point, it could be time to implement more specific training and to set performance-related goals. Equally, there’s nothing wrong with just maintaining your newfound fitness.
Exercise always needs to be considered alongside diet, whether you’re hoping to lose weight or simply get stronger. If you’re in the first camp, carefully examine what you are eating (quality and quantity) and implement incremental improvements rather than making drastic changes. If in the latter camp, I would advise reading about what nutrition will be key to recovering well.
And finally: remember that what you do five days a week for months or years is far more important than doing something heroic every now and then.