!! Bonus Fitness Falsehood !! Motivation Will Drive Your Fitness

It may be the biggest fitness falsehood of all time: Motivation will drive your fitness.

Motivation – like excitement, anger, joy, anticipation, and enthusiasm – is an emotion. And emotions come and go, wax and wane, to and fro…. Simply put, they aren’t consistent and they sure aren’t reliable. Yes, I see you there on Monday morning, ready to *crush* your workout and get the week started off with flair. And yes, I see you there on Thursday, work and family stress piling up, all the groceries you bought on Saturday gone, and you’re saying, “I’m just not feeling it today.”

Believing that you can rely on motivation (or its lying cousin, willpower) to help you create a consistent fitness routine is, frankly, pure fantasy. Motivation is a fickle friend and will bail on you more often than show up. I promise you that your sister who runs 5 days a week or your colleague who gets to the gym every morning doesn’t always feel motivated to get it done. But they have put routines into place so that they don’t have to think and decide every time they have a session scheduled whether they are going to do it or not. Maybe they have a fitness partner, maybe they have a personal trainer, or maybe they have an OCD-esque devotion to keeping all the appointments they put in their Google calendar… they have figured out the way to make their training a habit. And habits run your life.

The motivation to keep up your routine will come after you start sticking to the routine. Wha? The doing must come before the motivation – because the doing will stock the motivational fire. “But how can I do something if I’m not motivated to do it?” you’re asking. The same way you do so very many things in your life – you plan to do them, you put them in your routine, you make sure you have the supplies necessary, you get the support you need, you do them. I know it doesn’t sound super sexy. (Maybe if I used a different font?) But it is super effective.