Easy Ways to Get into the Fitness Habit

Exercise Habits Won’t Appear Magically – Here are Five Ways to Get into Your Fitness Habit Groove

If exercise feels like a chore, you are undoubtedly lacking fitness habits.

While we’d all love to have motivation on tap, willpower will never work for the long term. My approach is to pair fitness with existing habits. By starting out small (even ‘silly small’) you’ll start to add exercise regularly. One day soon that inflection point comes. You start to feel the benefits, both physical and mental. When that happens, you are really on the road to a fitter healthier you.

This page is for anyone that wants to get started with fitness but keeps trying and failing.

You’ll find five tips to get started with building fitness habits below.

Fitness Habits #1 – Start Small, Silly Small

Silly small is a great place to start any new habit.

For fitness this could be as simple as one push up.

Just one.

You might want to download a free fitness tracking app, take the stairs instead of the lift – or even (safely) raise something like a book above your head.

The fitness habit concept here is to lower the barrier, do something so trivial it is daft, then see if you feel like repeating it – or even adding to it. Your brain (after those first few chuckles) will start to expect these small additions. Before you know it, doing something physical will be part of your routine.

As a personal example, I started with just a few pushups before my morning shower – and now do a mini-workout every morning.

Fitness Habits #2 – Get a Buddy Involved for Accountability

When you do things alone, it is far too easy to make excuses to miss your goals.

When you get a buddy involved, that simple barrier of having to explain to someone else why you skipped your daily workout is a powerful factor. It works both ways, meaning two of you get into the fitness groove faster. If you can’t find someone to share classes or a gym session with – then something as simple as sending a daily text when you complete your workout has an outsized effect.

Fitness Habits #3 – Stack Your Habits

The easiest way to get a new habit going is to pair it with an existing one.

We all have our routines, and once the initial phase of remembering to add a new behaviour is over, you’ll have a new automatic spot in your day for movement. I already mentioned pairing movement with my morning shower. Add to this drinking a big glass of water while I prepare my lunch before going to work, plus keeping vitamins next to the cooker so as to easily remember then when I cook my evening meal.

Make a list of your daily routines now and see where you can start stacking those exercise habits.

#4 – Measuring Your Success

Fitness trackers are free, and easy to use.

Those days when your motivation flags, it is valuable to check your progress. If you worked hard to go from sedentary to active and can see the upward sloping graph in terms of time spent exercising, you won’t want to break your streak.

Seeing how far you have come in a short space of time is motivating.

It is not just time working out and calories burned that should be measured. You can also track your sleep, eating habits and even your mood. All of those will improve as your general fitness level does. You can also track your progress on the consoles of treadmills, for example the iFit system used by NordicTrack

#5 – Holistic Habits for a Fit and Healthy Life

Any exercise is better than none, though working out alone will only get you so far.

Getting into the fitness habit involves a holistic view of your health and wellbeing. What you eat and when you eat is a great starting point. Especially when it comes to poisonous sugars and simple carbohydrates.

Sleep is a bedrock habit for fitness. Without a sleep routine, and quality rest (not the sedation version after boozing), you will find it hard to get into the fitness habit. Getting outdoors regularly and avoiding caffeine in the afternoon and evening will help you get a better quality of sleep.

Remember, great fitness habits start with silly-small beginnings.

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