Exercise Motivation

What if you don’t like to workout? Just the idea of getting in the gym and beginning to exercise sounds like pure torture and often times you find yourself fighting this feeling.

Sometimes you can overcome this lack of exercise motivation, but other times it gets the best of you and although you have temporary relief the next day you have regret.

Well it’s time to put an end to this regret, and learn the secrets of what motivates those who are most successful with winning the war against fat loss and poor muscle tone. What you may find is that it is easier than you had ever thought of…

Exercise Motivation: The First Step

Your first and most important step to help you win the psychology battle is pre-planning your workout routine. Do this before you even allow yourself the thought of “not feeling like it” and maybe the way to do it is to think you are just putting pen to paper for now and it’s not necessarily for today.

To make it even easier, I made you guys a free printable weight training log that you can start with and of course all you have to do is pick a workout plan from the workouts and training section of the site. I use this all the time with my clients because it’s neat and compact and a great way to track your progress.

What you’ll find is more important about this simple act of writing it down is that your mind will start to think about how good your muscles will look after training and ultimately how good you will feel about yourself.

Here’s trick to make this tip even more powerful. 30 minutes before you are planning to go workout, make a pre-workout energy matrix drink like the new Vega Sport Pre-Workout Energizer or Muscle Pharm Assault and put on some good music while you write out your exercise plan for the day. This one is so fool-proof there is no way you won’t be ready to go for your workout.

Exercise Motivation: The Second Step

Research backs it up, most of us dread the beginning of the exercise session the most but if we can get over that hump then the adrenaline kick brings pure euphoria. The challenge is getting over that dreaded part and from what I’m seeing most of us plan the most difficult exercises at the beginning of our workouts when our energy is the highest.

However, the psychological trick might be to actually put one or two of our favorite exercises at the beginning instead. You should hopefully know which ones these are, they are the ones that target your favorite body parts.

Now everything is turned upside down and you get that blood flowing and the adrenaline will push you through the rest of the more difficult exercises.

What about if you are doing a cardio workout? This one is easy, split it up. Start off with a short 5-7 minute warm up session on the bike machine and then gravitate to the treadmill, elliptical or whatever cardio exercise you are going to do afterwards. Just remember the warm-up session doesn’t have to be super long and the point is to get you to a light sweat so your muscles are warmed up.

Exercise Motivation: The Third Step

So you’ve finished your workout and you’re all good now right? Well no, let’s keep the positive energy flowing. While you are stretching out at the end of your workouts you should be thinking about all the good things you got from your workout and parts you liked most.

This immediately plants a very powerful seed which again backs up what you put in is what you get out. Be positive with this thought flow and know that it will take you a long way without having to put in more energy.

Now we want to complete this with a good night sleep so that our muscles are relaxed and ready to go the next day. This part is especially important since with inadequate sleep our motivation to keep this going will get slammed the next day so don’t lost track of it. Recently I came across a super supplement which is the king in aiding muscle recovery and growth while you sleep – Fusion Bodybuilding Sleeping-Giant, and although it is geared more for men, women can also get just the Shut-Eye component to help with sleep.

A habit to also put in place before you fall asleep is just running through your head the thoughts you have about your next exercise session and remembering how good it made you feel today.