The feeling is universal. You wake up with the best intentions of setting the alarm and at 6 am, as the alarm rings, the siren song of your warm bed is WAY stronger than the siren song of the cold weight room. When you decide to go to the gym and times comes for it, the whole day tiredness make you feel for rest. It all about the mind game. You will have to make your mind before the time of going to the gym.
To surmount this inertia it is not enough to work harder. It requires some tactical rewiring of your routines, attitude, and space. It is having a system in place that makes it easier to be consistent than quit.I am mentioning 5 major strategies to overcome this laziness mind.
Strategy 1: Redefine the power of your micro goals
The most prevalent cause of gym laziness is too general and big an objective. I want to get fit, I need to lose weight, or I want to get bigger are noble goals, but horrible day to day motivators. They are mountains far off on the farther shore, and the way to them is long, tedious, and unrewarding in the present. This is where the magic of micro-goals is involved.
The Issue: Brain has been programmed to want instant satisfaction. It is easy for you to make lame excuses to quit your gym before the goals are about to complete. It is this or nothing thinking that is a key motivator of laziness.
The Solution: Rework your definition of success by moving it to the micro level. Winning no longer means losing 20 pounds but instead accomplishing the one small task directly in your line of sight.
How to Implement It:
The 5-Minute Rule: It is sometimes as simple as getting there. Remind yourself that you just need to exercise five minutes. As soon as you are transformed, have gone to the gym, and begun to move, the worst of it is done. You will feel well enough to complete your entire workout 90 percent of the time. But still, even then, you finished your commitment to yourself even though you did five minutes. That's a win.
Process-Oriented Goals: Other than losing 2 pounds this week, make goals such as:
- Pack my gym bag the night before.
- Hit my daily protein target.
- Do all my target weight of squats.
- Go to the gym on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
After winning your goals, you should record your wins to make a habit. These wins will have a very positive result for you mind and will boost your efforts to carry the same energy for the next day.
When you set your targets ridiculously small and easily reachable you create a sequence of successes. These efforts will make a trust in you and will help you to carry on. A logical extension of these regular micro-wins will then translate into the macro results.
Strategy 2: Design Your Environment to Work The Way You Want.
Determinations are limited in nature. You use it every day when making decisions, preventing distractions in the workplace, and social scenarios. When you decide to go to the gym, you are usually left with an empty tank of will power. The point is to quit using the force of will and begin using automation. The Issue: You leave yourself too many points of failure. "Should I go to the gym? What should I pack? What workout will I do? What if it's busy?" Both of these questions require investing slightly more mental effort, and thus, laziness is the easiest way to go.
The Solution: Prepare your environment to make the correct decision the least difficult. Eliminate the necessity to make a choice when one is tempted.
How to Implement It:
The Ritual of the Night Before: This is uncompromising. Prepare all your exercise garments, footwear and earphones. Grab your gym bag, water bottle, pre workout snack, towel and locker lock. Put it just next to the door or in your passenger seat. You have brought to pass an elimination of the morning scramble, a popular excuse.
Plan Your Exercises: It's not simply an after work thought that you should leave your gym time. Take it as a serious business meeting. Add a reminder to your digital calendar by blocking out the time. This gives it an obligation and form.
Plan Your Workouts in Advance: Endlessly wandering mindlessly in the gym is a motivation murderer. Always have a plan of what you are going to do during your workout. A fitness-tracking application or a phone note page with your workout, sets, reps and rest periods listed out can be used in this way.
Now, it’s not just letting yourself down; it is letting somebody down and losing money. This economic and social stress is a great antidote to indolence.
When your environment is set to succeed there is no need to make a choice to be disciplined but to just walk along the laid tracks.
Strategy 3: Find Your Why and Relate to Intrinsic Motivation.
Extrinsic motivations, such as the desire to appear good at a wedding or vacation, may give a person a jump-start, but it usually dies away. When the original excitement has died away, and the suffering of labour seems more than the remote prize, laziness sets in, and the prize itself seems less than the labour. Sustainable motivation is intrinsic, it originates internally.
The Solution: Go deeper to a more emotional, identity-based, and immediate feeling with regard to the immediate feeling of exercise.
How to Implement It:
The 5 Whys Technique: Continue asking questions Why? until you strike at an emotional centre.
- "I want to get stronger." Why?
- So I do not get tired keeping up with my kids. Why?
- So that I can be a full-on present parent and make them happy memories. Why?
- They make me want to be healthy because I love them and want to spend most of my life with them.
- This Why is infinitely stronger than I want to lose 10 pounds.
Stop Devoting Time to Your Appearance and Start Devoting Time to Your Emotions: You should no longer be worried about how you want to look, rather, you should care about how you want to feel. Are you exercising because you need the endorphin rush after your workout that will make all your stress melt away? That it renders to the mind The sanity it imparts? To feel proud and achieve something when you pick up a new weight? Connect your justification to attend to the immediate positive emotional compensation.
Create a Persona: No more trying to work out. Begin to speak as a person who appreciates their health and strength. Your actions will gradually conform to who you are. You never miss the gym because it is not in your nature as a person.
As long as your purpose in going to the gym is connected to your values and your physical health right now, laziness becomes irrelevant. It is just not an exercise, but it is a promise you make to yourself to make yourself a person you really are.
Strategy 4: Make it a thing you are looking for! It should be a fun to do.
You will also never be consistent in your workouts when you are afraid. It is innate in the human brain to prevent pain and seek pleasure. Once the gym is linked to pain, boredom, and discomfort, your subconscious mind will creatively devise reasons why you should not go. The answer is to inject fun and enjoyment into the process in an active way.
The Problem: Your exercise plan is a boring, punishing experience that you do not love, but put up with.
The Answer: Design an experience which you truly look forward to. Make the gym your sanctuary.
How to Implement It:
The favorite Playlist: Music is a very important tool. Make a playlist of gym power songs which are known to uplift your mood and give you strength. Your workouts should be a special treat, so you should only save this playlist.
Find Your Fitness friend: Experiment! Gym is not the only way of getting fit. Unless you love to lift weights, you will not be able to stick to it. Try:
Group Fitness: The vibe in a spinning class, yoga, or boot camp is exceptionally contagious and enjoyable.
Rock Climbing, Dance, Martial Arts: These are skills based sports, which are not boring and not exercise.
Sport Leagues: a social, competitive activity is joining a leisure soccer, basketball or volleyball league.
Gamify Your Workouts: Take an advantage of technology. You can make fitness a game by employing fitness trackers and apps that offer badges, streaks, and the opportunity to compete with friends.
The reward after workout: This is a little healthy reward that you need to pair with exercise. This can be a tasty smoothie, 20 minutes in the sauna or listening to your favorite podcast in the cardio cinema. This makes a positive opioid loop in your brain.
Once you really enjoy the activity, then you no longer need motivation. You will be glad to go, it is something to look forward to in your day, not something to put a check on.
Strategy 5: No All or Nothing or Be Self-Compassionate.
The all-or-nothing mentality is, perhaps, the most destructive. You miss a training session that you are meant to attend and the inner critic begins to speak: Well, you ruined your great week. You're a failure. You could always begin on Monday again. It is one misstep, a downward spiral of shame that will lead to the miss of the entire week, and, further the sense of idleness, can be strengthened.
The Problem: Perfectionism. You see consistency as a pass/fail examination, and anything but that would be an absolute failure.
The Answer: Be flexible, self-understanding. Hear me out, life happens and that progress is never linear in the long term.
How to Implement It:
It's neutral. Ask yourself, without judgement: What made me miss today? Was I overly tired? Did my work schedule explode? Am I not recovering properly?" Examine it, educate yourself on it, and then forget about it.
The Rule of Consistency, or Never Miss Twice: This is the golden rule. Anyone can miss one workout. It takes the creation of a habit to be broken when you miss the next one. So, not going on Tuesday makes it your number one priority on Wednesday, even if it is a shorter, less intense workout. This helps to avoid one day of absence becoming a quit.
Talk to Yourself Like a Friend: You would never tell a friend that they are a lazy failure because he or she will miss one gym session. You would push them and remind them to get going again. Show the same benevolence and support to yourself.
Emphasize The 80/20 Principle: Be consistent 80 percent of the time. By doing 3-4 workouts each week (or most weeks), you are miles ahead of the person who does 5 one week and zero the next three. It is long-term average that counts.
By letting the perfectionism go, you take away the fear of failure that has such a paralyzing effect on us. You can give yourself grace of being human which is the ultimate pillar of the strong and permanent fitness habit.
The Final Rep
It is not about struggling against your nature to overcome gym laziness, it is about collaborating with your nature. It is an art of wit, rather than strength. You can make gym a fun for your entertainment and play. Quit struggling to overcome indolence. Instead, get a routine so solid that laziness just has no room to settle. Now, and take out your exercises clothes tomorrow. That's your first win.
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