8 Mental Strategies to Help You Stick With Exercise

Practical advice to help you crush your fitness goals

- Jenny Mccoy

Figuring out how to stick to a workout routine is tough. Let’s face it: it’s much easier to make fitness resolutions than to keep them. Well, what if this year were different? Here, exercise experts share the mental techniques to stick to a workout routine and meet your fitness goals when you’re feeling overwhelmed, discouraged or unmotivated.

FOCUS ON SIMPLY GETTING YOURSELF TO YOUR WORKOUT

Often, the hardest part of figuring out how to stick to a workout routine is simply getting to a space to do it – and not the exercise itself. “Just showing up is more than half the battle,” explains gym owner Kellen Scantlebury. So instead of worrying about your workout – how hard it may be, or how tired you think you’ll feel afterwards – concern yourself with the sole logistical task of getting there.

“Once you’re there, you’ll feel so much better about having made the effort to get there,” says Kellen. This mini boost will, more often than not, give you the mental push you need to then start your workout.

BE PATIENT

“At the beginning of the year, there’s that frenzy [to achieve fitness goals],” says personal trainer Maryam Zadeh. Amid this frenzy, it’s easy to expect immediate results. You put in hard work at the gym for a week and are then disheartened when you can’t yet do a perfect press-up. In reality, though, depending on your current fitness level, perfecting the press-up may take weeks or even months of hard, consistent work. This disconnect between expectation and reality can be seriously demotivating.