Budgeting Your Motivation
Make sure you’ve checked out Parts 1, 2, and 3 before you read this one.
Imagine that your motivation is money. The different disciplines in your life are countries with different currencies, so that your motivation is stronger in some domains, and weaker in others. Some people start with more or less money than you do, and their money may be stronger in different currencies compared to yours.
We often hope to overcome issues of fitness motivation by hoping we’ll have more of it next time. Just as hoping to win the lottery is not a good way to manage your finances, this is not a good way to maintain your motivation to workout when you’re preparing to take on a new challenge.
Continuing with this analogy, part 2 of this blog was about making sure we aren’t borrowing money from a sketchy source that will punish us with interest at a later date. Part 3 was about making sure we don’t associate our money with our self-worth or future prospects. This part will be focussed on budgeting your money.
Budgeting Your Fitness Motivation
You’ll never have an endless supply of willpower and motivation, but you’d be surprised at how often we burn ourselves out by making things harder than necessary; for example, by adopting behaviours that make your fitness journey very difficult to maintain.
You can do a much better job of sustaining your motivation if you budget it. Check out these examples:
| Bad Budgeting |
| 1) Starting diets and cleanses that make you feel miserable and hungry. |
| 2) Going cold-turkey on all your favourite food. |
| 3) Aiming to finish every workout sore and sweaty. |
| 4) Lifting the heaviest weight every time you train. |
| 5) Keeping your goals to yourself in case you fail. |
| 6) Expecting a 100% attendance rate no matter how you feel. |
| 7) Pinning all your hopes for happiness on getting your dream body. |
| Good Budgeting |
| 1) Avoid restrictive, gimmicky diets that will cause you to binge at a later date. |
| 2) Don’t label foods as “good” or “bad”, and don’t ban them outright |
| 3) Prioritise consistency over intensity. |
| 4) Keep a few reps in reserve and prioritise good technique. |
| 5) Create a system of accountability – tell a friend or training partner. |
| 6) Give yourself a break before you hate the gym or get injured. Remind yourself that taking a break does not erase all your progress. |
| 7) Equate success with the process, rather than the outcome. Understand that you deserve happiness now. Accept that results will probably take longer than you expect. |
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Understand Your Goal
“If you don’t have useful information, what are you going to impose your will on?”
Ethan Suplee
The key to budgeting your fitness motivation is understanding the processes behind the changes you want to make. You don’t have to become a sports scientist overnight, but knowing what factors underpin your success will allow you to pick the battles that are worth fighting. Once again, breaking down misconceptions is key. Take this common example:
A lot of people come to the gym with this kind of objection before anyone has even told them it’s necessary. Depending on your exact goals, you may have to reduce alcohol consumption or reduce calories elsewhere, but sustainable habits are rarely built on the back of cold turkeys so it’s unlikely that quitting alcohol completely would work.
Another example is the sometimes-daunting level of soreness that accompanies those first couple of workouts. Although some soreness is inevitable, we often make it so much worse by pushing ourselves to the limit from day one. Being ridiculously sore in the first few weeks of training can really harm your motivation to workout.
Our first weeks of training are the period where we need the least amount of stress to get results, so there is very little benefit to hammering your body early on. This “go hard or go home” mentality is another unnecessary drain on your willpower.
Unnecessary Sacrifices
It’s a common misconception that achieving your goals will hinge on these kinds of extreme sacrifices. The problem with this is that, from day one, you’re fixated on doing something you really don’t want to. We sometimes blindly set goals that will make us unhappy because we associate fitness with discomfort. Sacrifice is par for the course, right?
Wrong. We often make sacrifices that are not essential to achieving our goals because they feel hardcore or they promise quicker results.
A more sustainable approach is to limit the severity of our sacrifices, especially in the early phase while we’re disrupting our lifestyle trying to build habits. Once a routine is in place, you may have the “spare” willpower to make more sacrifices if necessary. And if there is a behaviour change that is essential to your goals, and you’re still not prepared to make that change, then it may just be that those goals are not right for you right now.
Choosing a goal or method that’s at odds with a lifestyle you love is the biggest willpower drain of them all.
Non-Negotiables
A key part of budgeting fitness motivation is identifying your non-negotiables. These are things you are NOT prepared to do in order to reach your goals. Establishing these early on in the goal-setting process will:
- Solve problems before they arise;
- Set healthy expectations;
- Deconstruct the perfectionistic idea of your fitness journey.
My Non-Negotiable
My goal when I was younger was to successfully compete in full-contact kickboxing. I decided I didn’t want to diet down to a lighter weight category like many fighters do. I was tall and skinny, and my opponents were often much stronger than me, so dropping to a lighter weight could have mitigated that problem slightly…but I wasn’t prepared to fixate on my diet because it would have ruined the fun of training for me. This was my non-negotiable.
But your non-negotiables can change, too. In the early days, I was responsible for more of my own meals, and had disposable income from my first job, so I could treat myself to junk food whenever I wanted. Cutting weight was out of the question. Years later, when the novelty of this lifestyle had worn off slightly, I was offered a local title fight in a lower weight group. At this point I was sufficiently motivated to drop to a lower weight-group for the fight, meaning I could make small alterations to my diet without making myself miserable.
Just because you identify something as non-negotiable at the beginning of your journey doesn’t mean you can’t change your mind later.
Tasks for Budgeting Your Fitness Motivation
Answering these questions will improve your understanding of what you want to achieve and what you’re prepared to do to get there. This is where your understanding of training processes will come in handy – you may wish to lean on a professional’s knowledge for this part, but be as active in the process as you can – own the solutions.
- List your goals. Try to use measurable goals, broken down into small steps, with rough timelines.
2. Identify the factors that determine your success. I.e. creating a calorie deficit, mastering a certain lift, cooking more food at home.
3. What are you prepared to do to maximise these factors? i.e keep a food diary, hire a trainer, increase your weekly training sessions, learn new recipes.
4. Identify your non-negotiables. What are you NOT prepared to do right now? What behaviours would make you miserable?
How can you work around these non-negotiables? There is more than one way to skin a cat.
Preparation is Key
A clearer understanding of the actions required to make progress gives us a much clearer roadmap of our success. The next (and last) step is to have an understanding of the ways we are most likely to fail.
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