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Introduction

When starting a fitness habit, one of the biggest obstacles will always be finding motivation to workout. Unless you’re superhuman (or kidding yourself), you’ve probably asked yourself one of the following questions at one point:

• How do I get motivated to work out?
• What is causing my lack of motivation?
• Why do I get super motivated, only to fall off the bandwagon weeks later?

The Fitness Motivation Cycle

We tend to go through cycles of motivation. Sometimes, your motivation will be super high. This leads you to set up a new training or dietary routine. A few weeks pass by if you’re lucky, then boom – it’s all over. Your motivation takes a nosedive. You give up your hard work and go back to square one. Then the next time you feel pressure to change, the cycle begins anew.

It’s easy to see the “giving up” part of the cycle as the point where everything goes wrong, but that’s not the case. Every part of the cycle is wrong. I promise I’m not about to get started on the “motivation is BS” rant that most of you will have read on social media by now, but I do believe that breaking this motivation cycle is the key to creating sustainable fitness habits.

Improving Your Motivation is Difficult!

Don’t be put off if you haven’t been “cured” by the sensationalist motivational content created by trainers and fitstagram models. If it was easy to get motivated, we’d all have achieved all of our life dreams before our 30s. In this series, we’ll go through motivation step-by-step covering the following:

• Your source of motivation.
• Your sense of identity in relation to your goals.
• How to avoid things that drain your motivation.
• Creating a back-up plan for when you feel demotivated.

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Fitness Motivation and Weight Loss

1. I feel that people focussed on their body composition are the ones most likely to lose motivation in the first place;
2. Of all training aims, I feel that weight loss is the one most vulnerable to derailed by the ugly side of the fitness industry;
3. To this day, it’s easily the most frequent goal of any new clients I meet.

For these reasons I think this article will be more relatable if I write it with a focus on body composition goals, but most points will still be relevant if you’re someone who’s struggling to get motivated to do your rehab after an injury, or your strength and conditioning to get better at your sport.

I believe this approach is not only more positive, but more sustainable. Ultimately, this is what we all want: to strike up a stable relationship with fitness, free from fluctuating levels of motivation and shame. This will be our focus in the days to come.

Looking at Fitness Motivation Differently

Although we will deal with specific opportunities for improving the quality and quantity of our motivation to workout, it’s important to remember we are never going to be 100% motivated 100% of the time.

In my career as a trainer, I have met other coaches who claim to be completely dedicated to their workouts. These coaches often look down their noses at people who struggle to commit to a training programme or calorie deficit. However, these people inevitably run into their own issues with motivation.

His motivation plummeted! He began skipping workouts and fell behind on his weightlifting programme. It was months before he got back on track.

It Can Happen to Anyone

I think most of us can admit that under these circumstances, our motivation would take a beating too. Think about how many of the stages of this story you can relate to:

• Being demoralised because you haven’t made the progress you expected;
• Taking on an extreme challenge to get quicker results;
• Pushing ahead with an unsustainable workload;
• Having your routine disrupted by an unpredictable obstacle.

These pitfalls are related to the different aspects of motivation I’ll be covering over the next couple of days, but the important thing to note is that they can happen to anyone, any time. We will all always be vulnerable to circumstances that harm our motivation.

Stop looking at fitness motivation as a problem to be solved, or a resource to be spent. Instead, start viewing it as a product of your preconceptions about fitness, your relationship with your body, your values and your lifestyle. It will always be in a state of flux, and you have to react to this on a given day instead of blaming yourself if things aren’t perfect.

Get Ready

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