Motivation: The Great Equalizer

I think the hardest part of getting fit and staying fit is hands down, MOTIVATION (or a lack there of). For those of you who agree with me keep reading. For all of those who have no problem with motivation…stop reading now and go workout….see  ;)

We all have these wonderful ideas in our heads of what healthy meals we are going to eat tomorrow and we all saw that awesome workout on Instagram today, so we are definitely going to hammer it out at the gym tonight. But by the time 11 am rolls around you have already consumed the donut you swore you wouldn’t, and the gym is sounding less enticing by the minute. All you want to do after a hard day at work is go home and relax, exerting yourself is the last thing on your mind. But why?

Well there are a lot of reasons why. You are tired, you had a hard day, you don’t feel up for it, you think you might be getting sick, you exercised yesterday so you deserve a day off….I could go on forever because I have used every excuse in the book. Motivation will always be a challenge, it is always going to ebb and flow, but there is a way to make it flow more than others do and if you keep reading I will let you in on my secret.

No successful man or woman ever became great by accident. Success is not an overnight thing, even if it may appear to be “an overnight success” it NEVER is. To excel at anything, a career, a sport, a hobby, takes a lot of time, effort, planning, commitment and yes, hard work. Getting your body in tip-top shape should be no different from advancing your career. You wouldn’t expect to get promoted without proving that you are the best employee, so why do we expect our bodies to shift when we have given a half-assed attempt at “working-out” (if you can even call it that).

If you want to get into shape, if you want to lose 15 lbs, if you want to run a marathon, if you want to climb El Capitan, you MUST have a plan.

If you want to run a marathon but you hate running and you work 12 hour days, it is not realistic for your plan to be “run two hours everyday until the marathon.” This is not a plan. First of all you can’t even run  20 minutes without wanting to die so why would you set yourself up for failure at the start? Also this plan has no intermediate goals or time frames other than the marathon, so there is no sense of accomplishment until the end, if you can even get there.

You might be thinking that this whole “plan” thing only works for specific goals like marathons, I am not even a fan of marathons, I have no interest in running one, so you are wrong. I record my exercise every single day and I have for the past 5 years without a goal as concrete as a marathon. Why? Because if I didn’t write down what I did at the gym, I would have no way of knowing what to do tomorrow to push myself harder. For me, becoming stronger than the person I was yesterday is what it is all about. I want to do 25 push-ups, not 24. I want to be able to hammer out 8 pull ups, not 5. If  you want to lose weight then record your diet and log how much cardio you do each day, you can even plan out your meals ahead of time.

Coming up with a plan is half of it, then recording your actions and holding yourself accountable is the other half. When it all comes together you no longer look at exercise as a chore, but as a part of your daily life that you can’t imagine being without.

So you might think that planning and motivation are different things, the two are not connected and that even if you have a plan you still need motivation. You are correct to say that even if you have a plan you still need motivation, but the PLAN is what will keep you motivated. Writing out your daily activity in a calendar is a motivator because if I write “OFF” I will have to look at that for the rest of the month. If I force myself to write down my meals for the month, I will have to stare at that chocolate shake for the rest of September! This creates motivation to stay on track, to not skip out on exercise and to not cheat on your diet. Now go create an awesome plan for yourself this month but make sure you start off easy on yourself. Take baby steps, the first phase of your plan should be very simple and attainable, this success in the beginning will build your confidence and take you the whole way.