Tuesday, March 13, 2012

5 Great Ways To Motivate Yourself To Exercise

Hello participant,

I hope you're excited about this semester’s GET FIT challenge and that you're ready to complete all your workouts to win a prize!!

This week’s work out idea is about HOW TO KEEP YOURSELF MOTIVATED!

** Remember: Rec Center’s hours are:     Mondays – Fridays: 7am – 10:30pm
                                                                      Saturdays: 12pm – 10:30pm
                      Sundays: 1pm – 10:30pm **  

GET FIT is sponsored by PPOW - Peers Promoting Organized Wellness. Want to know more about us?
Go to http://www.ashland.edu/students/rec-services/fitness-wellness/ppow


-          Adapted from ineedmotivation.com
At this point, everyone is pretty much aware of the huge upside to exercising regularly. The reason that there aren’t more people doing it is the sheer lack of motivation. There is nothing that pushes them enough to go out there and exercise. Fortunately, there are some very useful ways which you can use to motivate yourself to become a more active individual.
1.      Change from a “maybe” to a “must”
The first thing you need to do is to categorically include exercise into your lifestyle without any maybe’s or but’s. Exercising should be a must within your daily routine. Within your time management, there should always be time allocated to exercising. It can’t be stressed enough how important this is. Instead of trying to fit exercise into your tight schedule, make it a permanent part of it which is non-negotiable, and make other non-productive activities such as watching television secondary to it.

2.      Surround yourself with fitness-oriented people
If you are not exercising, have a look at your close unit of acquaintances. Chances are that most (if not all) of them are just as non-active as you are. If you want to be successful at not only starting but staying active over time, you definitely need to have friends that share this same goal with you. Having a training partner is one of the best ways to get you the proper motivation to keep at it day in and day out. Someone with whom you can discuss the good and the bad, the positive and the negative, and that understands you fully are extremely important to your success at staying active. The bottom line is, if you are trying to be active, your non-active friends will never understand what you are going through and they are certainly not the right people that will motivate you to keep going.

3.      Think long term health benefits
Luckily, people are becoming more and more concerned with being healthy and living a better quality of life as they get older. Use this to your advantage as well to motivate yourself to exercise. The list of health benefits that exercising provides you with is just enormous. By thinking about maintaining a high quality of life for years to come, you are thinking long term and thus you can find the proper amount of motivation to stay active even during times that you feel like giving up. We all want to be healthy, and going through health concerns brings about much stress to our life as well as to those that we love. That’s one of the strongest motivations you could ever have to turn your life around with exercise.

4.      Work towards a goal
Do you have a reunion to go to in a few months and you want to look your best? Do you have a vacation planned and you want to look fantastic in a bathing suit? Do you idolize a certain person and want to look just like them? These types of goals are extremely powerful, and can provide unrelenting motivation that can then carry you towards those very goals. The key is to always have such a goal, because you don’t want to go back to your old ways once you have reached that goal. Always have something to work towards, and every time you reach one, create a new one. You will not only be amazed at the amount of motivation this creates, but you will astound yourself at how much you can accomplish that you never thought possible before.

5.      Simply start
As hard as it is to get yourself to start, you will be happy to know that things get much better as you keep going. The steepest hill to climb over is to start. Once you start, you have conquered the biggest obstacle. This is something that you should be proud of. Once you start, you put the wheels in motion to create momentum, and this momentum is crucial to bring you towards the finish line. But for that to happen, you need to start. So stop finding excuses and ways to delay your start. Choose to start exercising today, and never look back. You will be thankful that you did

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