Following the success of the Six Essential Exercise Guidelines by Jonathan Cooke, Edinburgh based personal trainer, Chartered Physiotherapist and founder of JC Fitness, Jonathan is back with some useful ways to maintain motivation for your home-workouts during lockdown.
Introduction
As the country enters its ninth week of quarantine, the coronavirus pandemic keeps gym doors closed and group exercise classes at bay. On paper, this seems like a perfect time to exercise ourselves into incredible shape, but, like many, you may be finding it difficult to stay motivated to exercise at home.
Surrounded by the comforts of home, it’s getting increasingly easy to talk yourself out of home workouts. Limited exercise options, lack of social contact, restricted space, and even too much time (if you can believe it!) can all work against your efforts stay, or find, motivation to exercise.
So, how can you strengthen your resolve to workout at home when plopping on the sofa and watching Netflix is so tantalising? I’ll let you in on the 4 most effective ways to stay motivated for home workouts.
1. Create A Specific Plan For Home Workouts
While many people think they lack motivation to exercise, what they actually lack is clarity for exercise. You may be one of many that says “i’m going to exercise today,” but don’t specify when, where, or what you’ll be performing. People tend to wait to “feel” motivated to exercise. Unfortunately, without the basic details for action, this waiting relies purely on willpower and hope that a sudden wave of inspiration will arrive.
In contrast, research shows that when people create a specific plan for when and where they will perform a habit they are much more likely to follow through. A study published in the British Journal of Health Psychology (2002) showed that 91% of subjects that wrote down where and when they would exercise were more than twice as likely to follow through with their workouts compared with subjects that did not plan their exercise.
By simply writing down beforehand when and where you will exercise, you create what the researchers call an implementation intention. That is, how you intend to implement your exercise. Once you set an implementation intention, you eliminate vagueness and ambiguity and create clarity through a plan of action. So, stop waiting to “feel” motivated to workout and complete this sentence:
I will workout on [DAY] at [TIME] in [LOCATION] and complete [EXERCISE PLAN].
2. Create Variety In Your Home Workouts
With the surge in demand for exercise equipment, you probably have a better chance of finding hand sanitiser during quarantine than kettlebells or dumbbells. Unless your home is already set up with exercise equipment, you may find the boredom of repeating the same exercises negatively impacting your motivation to perform them. Research suggests that changing exercises in workouts can help enhance motivation to exercise, resulting in better exercise outcomes.
A recent 2019 study by Baz-Valle and colleagues explored whether motivation was greater using a resistance exercise program with fixed exercises or a resistance training program with varied exercises. This study found that, compared with fixed exercises, randomly changing exercises each workout significantly enhanced motivation of subjects. The findings are important as several studies indicate that motivation is strongly linked to exercise adherence.
With minimal or no access to exercise equipment, you’ll need to get creative with what you have. The good news is, the home environment is easily modifiable to accommodate variety. Look to use home items like an arm chair, sofa, broomstick, and bed sheets to craft new exercises to implement variety into your home workouts. To help out, the accompanying video provides options for both resistance bands and bodyweight exercises with progressions depending on experience level.
3. Create Workout Cues By Priming Your Environment
Cues are what trigger our brain to initiate a particular behaviour. They are a piece of information that feed the brain and trigger a craving or desire to act. Best selling author James Clear, who wrote Atomic Habits, suggests that cravings drive a persons motivation to perform a specific behaviour and that “what people crave is not really the habit itself but the change in state it delivers.” For example, you may not crave exercise, rather you crave the result exercising gives.
So, create a cue and you will automatically trigger a craving and motivate a response, which in this case, is exercise. What does a cue look like? When your alarm clock goes off, that’s a cue to wake up. When you see sweets on your counter, that’s a cue to eat them. Cues can be anything that stimulate any one of your senses to provide a initial stimulus.
How do you create a cue for exercise? Make the cue so blatantly obvious you can’t miss it. If your home workout space is your living room, prime that space for exercise by laying out your exercise equipment (your cue). Your cues could be dumbbells, resistance bands, a yoga mat, or even running shoes. Importantly, do not place your cues in the corner of the room, or under the coffee table, where it’s difficult to see. Place the exercise equipment where it’s unmissable. By doing so, your exercise equipment will create a powerful visual cue that, every time you enter your designated workout space, will trigger a response to workout.
4. Track Your Exercise Progress
Progress is arguably the greatest form of motivation. Just like we enjoy crossing tasks off to-do-list, it gives a feeling of moving forward, a sense of momentum. Human brains are wired for this sense of completion because it brings pleasure. The more frequently you experience this sense of progress in your home exercise, the more likely you are to sustain motivation to exercise over the long-term.
A study completed by Harvard researcher Teresa Amabile who tracked the daily habits of 238 knowledge workers showed that a sense of progress boosted motivation more than any other factor. Amabile highlights that minor steps or “small wins,” enhance motivation even more than big leaps in progress. The catch is, to feel progress, it needs to be tracked. As writer Jocelyn K. Glei notes, “most of us make small or large advances every day, but we fail to notice them because we lack a method for acknowledging our progress.”
Tracking your home exercise progress starts with using a workout tracker. This can be anything from a digital app to a notebook, but it should be simple and easy to record with. Here is a simple 3 step process I use for recording my home workouts:
STEP 1: Write your implementation intention at the top of the page.
I recommend using your workout tracker to record your implementation intention outlined in strategy one of this article. Write down the time, date and place of your workout at the top of the page or screen (if possible).
STEP 2: Write out your home workout.
Write out your workout routine for that day. Planning your workout allows you to focus on your exercise and less on recording during the workout. This can be as simple as writing the exercise and number of sets for completion. For example:
Exercise 1: Kneeling Bodyweight Press-Up
-
- Set 1:
- Set 2:
- Set 3:
STEP 3: Record After Each Set.
When you get going in your workout, it’s easy to forget how many sets you’ve completed. All the huffing and puffing can create mental lapses that make you lose track of your workout. To avoid this, simply record your repetitions after each set instead of at the end of your workout.
About the Author:
Jonathan Cooke is certified personal trainer and Chartered Physiotherapist in Edinburgh. Through his coaching, writing, and filming Jonathan’s mission is to use his knowledge, experience and passion for health and fitness to teach and inspire people to elevate the results in their own fitness journey. He operates an evidence-based personal training service called JC Fitness together with a team of highly skilled personal trainers that all share a common passion for helping people reach their health and fitness objectives.
To learn more about their services, you can visit them at: www.jcfitness.co.uk
