3 Best Ways To Get Motivated To Workout Everyday

It’s hard enough to get up every morning if you are not a morning person. What’s harder is to get motivated to workout everyday. It gets easier but doing it every day is the hard part.

Take a look at what we’re dealing with right now:  Social isolation, loss of employment, social upheaval, relationship breakdowns – life isn’t all sunshine, rainbows and lollipops. 

It’s normal to have days where you feel less motivated than others. Nobody consistently gets out of bed and throws their shoes on, ready to take on the day, especially with what 2020 has offered so far. 

But what do you do when you feel desperate, defeated, and just want to give up? 

Why do I want to Give Up?

The first step to overcome a lack of motivation is to figure out why you feel this way. Motivational speaker, Tony Robbins, says that generally, when you feel like giving up, there are three limiting emotions that could be the cause: “loss,” “less” or “never.”

Loss: Although we’re intimately familiar with loss, it doesn’t make it any easier. Losing a loved one can be crippling, losing a job can make you feel worthless, and a loss of relationship can leave behind an empty hole in your life. 

Less: Have you ever felt like you’re just not good enough? Maybe you didn’t get the raise you wanted, perhaps your proposal was overlooked in favor of a coworker, or your mixed-league softball team lost badly in the big game – either way, if you let “I’m not good enough” drive, you’re not in charge of your life. 

Never: According to Robbins, this is the worst feeling of them all. “If you get turned down for a date, you feel like you’ll never find love. If your business fails, you feel like giving up and going to work a regular office job. These are limiting beliefs and they only hold you back.”

“Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain [and] difficulty.” – Theodore Roosevelt

What Do I Do When I Want To Give Up?

Often, the reason we give up is to satisfy uncomfortable emotions, like anxiety, sadness, loneliness, or boredom. Learning how to balance emotions will improve your decision making and help you resist the urge to quit. 

Here are the 3 best ways to stay motivated and achieve your goals:

1. Move Your Body 

Exercise is a proven way to change your state of mind. If you feel unmotivated, work out. You don’t have to kill yourself at the gym, either. Exercise could be as simple as walking the dog or doing a home yoga routine. 

Some of the many benefits of exercise include: 

• Reduces risk of heart diseases.
• Helps manage blood sugar and insulin levels.
• Improves mental health and mood.
• Strengthens bones and muscles. 
• Reduces risk of some cancers including; colon, breast, uterine, and lung cancer.
• Reduces risk of falls. 
• Improves sleep. 
• Improves sexual health. 
• Increases chances of living longer. 

The best kind of exercise is one you enjoy, so you will keep up your routine and reap the physical and mental health benefits.

2. Nourish Your Body 

Healthy eating has a huge amount of benefits and plays a big part in maintaining motivation. When we eat well we sleep better, have more energy and have better concentration. When kids have a healthy diet, they get all the essential nutrients they need for proper growth and development and importantly, they develop a good relationship with food.

Active people with a well-balanced tend to:

• Have a healthy body weight.
• Feel good about themselves.
• Have energy.
• Have stronger muscles and bones.
• Enjoy better physical and mental health.

People who are poorly nourished and consume high calorie food like ‘junk food’, may:

• Be irritable or moody. 
• Be unable to focus on tasks.
• Have less energy. 
• Be uninterested in learning. 
• Be at higher risk of developing health issues such as; dental problems, heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer, depression, obesity, and more. 

3. Breathe

Your body can trick your mind. There is a neurological system in your body that you can trigger that will help you feel less stressed and more peaceful – The autonomic nervous system (ANS). This system regulates many automatic bodily processes, and usually operates outside of your awareness, but you can actually exercise conscious influence over the ANS by simply breathing deeply. 

The ANS consists of two parts – the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system activates the fight or flight response during perceived danger, and the parasympathetic nervous system restores the body to a state of calm.

Long, slow, deliberate breaths will engage the parasympathetic nervous system and release hormones that reduce stress, lower blood pressure and calm the mind and body.

There are many techniques to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, including:

• Spending time in nature
• Massage
• Meditation
• Play with animals or children
• Exercise

Conclusion: You can do it!

It can be tempting to make a bunch of changes all at once, but that could lead to giving into temptation and slipping back into the old, automatic habits. Instead, try to make just one change at a time, and make them small. So small, that they hardly require any motivation at all. Baby steps will turn into full-on running before you know it. 

“Success and failure are not overnight experiences. It’s the small decisions along the way that cause people to fail or succeed.” – Tony Robbins