How To Motivate Yourself To Workout For Beginners

Your heart is a muscle; it can get stronger and weaker based on how you condition it. The universal recommendation is to get at least 30 mins of exercise per day, but that still leaves 23.5 sedentary hours in your day. As explained in a previous article, North Americans are more motionless than ever.

Even if you commit yourself to 30 mins of walking it can make a big difference in your health. People who don’t decide to exercise are twice as likely to get heart disease than people that have an active lifestyle.

Regular exercise can help you:

Reduce cholesterol
Lower blood pressure
Burn calories & bad fats

The most challenging barrier people have to overcome when working out is, actually getting up and doing it. Most people work all day and do not want to get up extra early to workout before going to work, and most people are too tired after a long day, and the last thing they want to do is to work out.

These are all mental barriers that you have to set yourself to overcome. To attempt to combat these barriers you set on yourself try:

Setting goals and objectives

Goals without a time restraint are just wishes. Make sure that you give yourself a timeline to hit your objectives — set goals based on your weight, distances or lifting power and write them down. Writing your goals down makes them real; setting a time constraint makes them come true.

Example Goal: “I will lose 10 lbs in one month, by running 30 mins every day.”

Finding a good playlist!

“It is scientifically proven that music boosts performance, motivation and helps you push through the pain”. Music can have a profound effect on our emotional state – says Dr Costas Karageorghis from the University of London.

Different beats per minute (BPM) influence our feelings, the higher the beats per minute the more upbeat and motivated you will feel. The lower the BPM, the calmer you will feel, so certainly stick with a playlist that’s upbeat to motivate you!

Developing a solution/future-oriented thinking.

This will help you with your goal setting and motivation to get up off the couch even if you do not want to. Developing solution-oriented thinking means to think about the long term benefits and diverting from future problems because of the knowledge that you obtain right now.

Understand that if you do not commit to working out, you could cause problems to your physical and mental health in the future.

Realizing working out isn’t a sprint its a marathon

A group of people running

Understand by simply exercising you will not see results after your first training session… even after your third, fourth or fifth session. It’s essential that you do not let this discourage you from continuing.

Consistency is key. The more you test your body, the more adaptive it will become.

Rewarding yourself! (But not with sweets!)

This is a fun motivation tool. You can reward yourself with various things, but here are a few to get the thought juices flowing:

Put five dollars into a jar (or account) then once you hit 100 you can take it out.
Get new workout gear
After a certain number of workouts say, you can work out somewhere in nature opposed to the gym.

To help you get started, these are exercises we recommend to start with!