Creating A Fitness Habit
I’m a big believer in making health and fitness a part of your daily life, forever, rather than implementing crash diets and temporary workout schedules that will yield short term results. We want to feel strong and healthy from now on, right? Not just for the next four weeks.
With that being said, I think it is SO important to look at a new fitness goal from a habit-forming viewpoint. Let’s brainstorm what kinds of habits a person with a lean, healthy body would have. What are your thoughts? I would guess that lean, healthy people that have fitness as a part of their daily life do a few of the following (if not all of them):
Keeps a gym bag ready to go
Has workout gear at home if necessary
Plans their workout into their day as a priority
Wears comfortable clothing and shoes during their workout
Eats foods that fuel their body to have better workouts
What do you think? Sounds like a fitness junkie to me! So let’s talk about three ways that you can begin to implement fitness habits into your everyday life so that working out is no longer a question, it’s just something you do.
Believe In the Process
This process takes MONTHS AND YEARS. If anyone who's anyone is telling you you're going to get years worth of results in weeks or months, they are straight up wrong. Period, end of story. There's no magic pill or shake or program.
In knowing that building muscle and losing fat permanently will take years, that means that your “why” cannot be to transform your body. Yep, I said it. If your “why” for working out is because you want to look like Victoria's Secret model ASAP, well you’re going to lose steam really quickly. It just doesn’t work that way.
The first habit you’ll need to develop is finding a “why” that doesn’t have to do with the way you look and building on that why. For me, I started feeling better right away and that became addicting. I developed the habit of working out more easily because I craved feeling good.
Schedule It
Set the time for movement first in your daily planner. If you don't plan your days, maybe think about trying to. Make the time for movement. And don't start out balls to the wall. Start with something minimal, and reward yourself for making the time, not for killing yourself. For a beginner, it's way more about carving the time and adding it into the routine, showing up for the class, or moving your tooshy. Half the time when I started I had toddlers all over me, but I stuck to my routine. Or shifted it as need be.
Consistency is going to matter much more than the difficulty of your workouts, especially in the beginning. So plan 10-30 minutes per day to move your body and put that on your calendar before anything else. When I made the mental change to consistency as the goal, I made a commitment to myself. I made the consistency routine. And even though I listen to my body, I still have the time set aside every day. My commitment to myself had to matter. It had to matter as much as my commitment to meet a friend for dinner, or to whatever activity I signed the kids up for. If I couldn’t keep a promise to myself, what good were my promises to my friends, to my family? My relationship with my health had to matter just as much as every other relationship in my life.
Create a Playlist That Moves You
Generally, I go through the motions of pre workout, get dressed, music on, and that gear clicks into place, hype starts up and I get through my workout. By the end I feel powerful and strong. Music makes such a difference in the quality of my morning and my workout that I think it’s highly important that you either find a playlist or make one that will get you up and moving. Even though it’s a little habit, it will make a big difference. Don’t forget to add new music whenever you can so that you’re keeping it fun and interesting to listen to as your fitness habit develops.