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Each December, the fitness market goes into gear. Plastic surgery adverts fill your social media. Transformations are promised by the influencers. New Year, New You is what everyone is talking about. And all in February, the same gyms are half-full. The change initiatives are discarded. The motivation has vanished. This occurs due to the fact that we have all been duped into the myth that psychologists label as the Fresh Start Fallacy; that a change in a calendar date will somehow make change simpler.
It can’t. And the most valuable lesson you can pick up in the case of fitness this year may be the insight into the reason why.
The Seductive Lie of New Starts
Something intoxicating about the 1st of January. It is like a clean sheet of paper and an opportunity to be a different person. We say to ourselves, This time it will be different.
The problem? We had told ourselves that before. Last January. The January before that. Maybe even last Monday.
The new beginning is so strong that it allows us to forget about our failures in the past. We do not need to analyze the reason we quit previously. We do not need to alter our way of thinking. We only have to have a fresh date on the calendar and sufficient desire to start over.
Motivation is a dreadful basis for lasting change.
The reason why Motivation Doesn’t Work
Consider the last time when you were so motivated to exercise. Perhaps you have viewed an empowering video or viewed some transformation pictures of a person. You experienced that euphoria of energy, that will to do it at last.
How many minutes was that feeling? A day? A week, if you were lucky?
Motivation is an emotive, and as all emotives, it goes. You can not depend on being inspired on a daily basis throughout the rest of your life. You will have some mornings, when you will wake up tired. There are some evenings you’ll go home stressed. There will be weeks when it will be difficult. People who succeed at fitness don’t have more motivation than you. They’ve just stopped relying on it.
What Really Works: The Boring Truth
What the people who keep themselves in shape have is much more valuable than motivation. They have systems. It is a system that is indifferent to your feelings. You do not have to be inspired by it. It is nothing but a series of pre-determined behaviors that you follow irrespective of how you feel.
The following is what that would look like in practice:
You exercise on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings at 6 AM. Not because you feel like it. Not because you’re motivated. But since that is what you do on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 6 AM. You prepare your meals on Sunday afternoons. Not that you are excited about it. However, that is the meal prep time on Sunday afternoon.
You went to bed at 10 PM, as it is your time to sleep, and you know you will get enough rest to have energy in tomorrow to do another workout. Systems remove decisions. And decisions are where motivation kills.
The January Trap
This is what usually occurs in January: one makes the decision that they are actually going to become fit. They are energized during the New Year. So they go big. They join a gym membership, they promise to exercise six days every week, they change their whole diet, purchase new exercise garments, install three workout apps, and discuss their intentions with everyone. In February, they are burnt out. It is not about the inability to be willful. The issue is that they attempted to reform everything at the same time, which is only driven by temporary motivation.
Once they lost that drive (which they did immediately), they did not have a reason to fall back on. No established habits. No simple routine. Simply justice and disillusionment.
Developing a System that Persists Motivation
Not to be cliched, in case you want to change your fitness this year, forget about finding motivation. Construct something that is not too difficult that you can do even on a bad day.
Begin with one training session, three times a week. Not five times. Not every day. Pick the days and times now. Make them in your calendar like meetings that are significant.
You should keep your workout minimal to the extent that you cannot talk yourself out of it. Twenty minutes is more preferable than missing an hour-long session. Ten minutes is a preferable alternative to zero. Eliminate all impediments that come to mind. Prepare your workout attire the previous night. Keep your gym bag in your car. Be ready to use an alternative when you are not able to go to the gym. Then just show up. On the days when you do not feel like it. Particularly, when you are not in the mood.
The Two-Day Rule
A simple system that works is, never miss two days in succession.
Were you missing Monday workouts due to sickness? That’s fine. But that is to say, Wednesday is uncompromising.
This regulation does something effective. It will not allow a single missed workout to extend into a week of missed workouts, which will become a month, which will become a quit.
It also removes guilt. You can be allowed to miss occasionally. You’re human. The system accounts for that. It simply does not allow you to miss two consecutive times.
The Power of Consistency vs. the Power of Intensity
The majority believe that they should work extra hard, do more intense workouts. Challenge themselves to the maximum. Still, the individual who will moderate exercise 3 times a week over a year will record much better results than the individual who will go and do brutal exercise on a daily basis over a three-week period before getting tired.
Fitness is less variable compared to consistency. The small frequent deposits translate into huge returns in the long run. Yet you must keep on making those deposits. An average exercise done is infinitely better than an exercise that should have been done.
Redefining Success
Stop gauging success by the level of motivation. Quit comparing yourself with the intensity of your workouts.The one thing that measures success is sticking to your system. And assuming that your system claims you exercised three times in the course of the week, and you exercised three times, then you accomplished it. It does not matter whether the exercises were easy. It does not matter whether you did not break any personal records. You have done what you told you would do, and that is what creates a long-term change.
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