Fitness Motivation: 6 ways to amp yourself up for your session
6 min
© foodspring
We’ve all been there: you set the perfect health and fitness goals, only to feel the bitter sting of defeat when you miss a session. Where do you find the drive to get up, start again, and keep working? The answer’s different for everyone, so let’s figure out your fitness motivation type and how to optimize your personal routine! The keys are motivation and inner drive, and we’ll show you where to find them and how to activate them for your motivation type!
What’s Your Fitness Motivation Type?
While everyone has their own preferences and priorities, in general people are best driven by one of two types of motivation. On the one hand, you may have enough self-motivation (intrinsic) to work hard toward your fitness dreams. You can formulate your goals independently and use your inner drive to pursue success and reinforcement. On the other, you may need an external (extrinsic) source of motivation to motivate yourself and focus on a certain goal.
If you’re the intrinsic motivation type, you just need to channel your willpower and determination toward concrete goals – and add some flexibility to accommodate bumps in the road. The extrinsic motivation type needs ongoing external support to keep going and accomplish their goals, without being distracted by temptations. The most important sources of extrinsic motivation are highlighted in the next section.
Of course, you may not be one type all the time. Sometimes your training sessions may go like clockwork. For weeks, your workouts can be the highlights of your weekly and daily plan. Going to the gym doesn’t require any extra effort, you’re actually excited to go. And then a few weeks later everything is different, and you need some extrinsic motivation to challenge yourself again.
Motivation is the key to success, so it’s important to find out which form of extrinsic motivation works best for you!
How do I motivate myself to exercise?
Posters with motivational sayings not doing it for you? Making a New Year’s Resolution didn’t help either? Still want to stay motivated? Check out our 6 tips for making yourself get up and go exercise and to have even more fun while working out.
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Fitness Motivation through Social Media
Thanks to how connected the world is today, you can pursue common interests around exercise and healthy eating in global fitness communities. Take a look at some other personal success stories from people who document their training, nutrition, success, and failure to find motivation to work out.
Fitness YouTubers
There’s tons of fitness YouTubers who release videos every day, documenting their exercise and nutrition lifestyles, and they can give you some ideas for your own. Keeping up with their successes and progress makes you feel a sense of second-hand accomplishment and feel motivated to work on your goal as well. Watching how they motivate themselves through exercising helps spur you to get to your next workout and increase your motivation to exercise.
Motivational Videos
There’s plenty of motivational videos on various video platforms. A constant interplay of exciting music, images, and quick edits can help give you short-term motivation to get through a training session.
Athletes / Models / Hashtags on Instagram
Fitness models and athletes on Instagram inspire us daily with every post and encourage us to share our progress in their communities as well. Real motivational gold can be found with a little research under #fitness #motivation and other related hashtags. Check out the workout photos from our customers on our Instagram channel at @foodspring_uk and become part of our fitness movement.
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Motivation with Gym Buddies
Working out together motivates you while strengthening your social skills. A training partner who fits your style can help you both climb any motivation cliffs and cross workout valleys.
Training in pairs or groups not only motivates everyone involved, but also helps each person keep to their training schedule when their own motivation is at its lowest ebb. Whether you’re actively helping each other build muscle, just showing up to the gym at the same time, or having fun competing against one another, training together motivates you to stick with it and keep pushing yourself.
The benefits of training together:
- A sense of community builds confidence in your strength and abilities
- Enables you to do partner exercises and provide active assistance
- Check on each other’s execution and posture to avoid pain and injury
- Commitment to specific training dates
- Motivation for achieving exercise goals in a group or team is particularly high
- Friendly team competitions help you up your performance
Music as a Motivator
Studies have shown that listening to music while exercising can increase your performance. Pair your session with music you like listening to and that’s twice the reason to work up a sweat! If you’re having trouble motivating yourself to go to the gym, turn the volume up and listen to your favorite band or browse through fitness playlists until you find one you like.
Different types of exercise also go with particular styles of music to help optimize your workout experience. For example, rap is a perfect choice for running – create a playlist with beats per minute that land at about 50% of your running steps per minute.
Choosing the right music genre is also a great way to increase the intensity of your workout. While gentle sounds soothe your mind during your warm-up, louder and faster music during your intense abs training, for example, can help you push your limits.
Sets Goals to Motivate Yourself
Two of the most important puzzle pieces in your fitness plan are defining your goals and creating a realistic plan to achieve them. It’s important to distinguish between short-term (beginning a gym membership, successfully completing your first bench presses, squats, etc.) and long-term goals (reaching your feel-good weight, building up 3 kilos of muscle mass, finishing a marathon).
One path to success can be visualizing your fitness goals to make them more concrete. This can be done purely in your mind by imagining how you will look with more muscle or at a different weight, or in the form of a visual representation (a poster on the wall, a whiteboard, a collage on your phone etc.).
Principles of goal setting at a glance:
- formulate short-term and long-term goals
- visualize each goal
- reward yourself when you achieve a particular goal
It’s important to reward yourself after you achieve a goal. Rewards can be material, emotional, or culinary: New shoes, a trip to a spa, or your favorite indulgent meal – depends on what you’re in the mood for. Continual goal setting and subsequent rewards boost your motivation quickly. Of course, a Protein Cookie from our muscle pack or a delicious protein shake with our Whey Protein can also be a reward for your muscles after a hard workout.
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Fitness Motivation Through Routine
Rescheduled your workout for another day? Sure you’ll definitely manage to do it tomorrow morning? But the next day you’re tired and rescheduling again? Then it’s time to bring more structure into your daily routine. Humans are creatures of habit. We need a routine that helps subdivide our days and make ourselves feel more productive and satisfied.
Decide exactly which days of the week are going to be gym days. Mark those days in your schedule in pen. These are important dates with yourself! Today is Monday and your leg day, so follow through and do your training session. Afterwards, you’ll feel awesome because you accomplished what you set out to do.
Running into trouble planning your workouts? Create a regular, structured workout plan to help you establish your workout routine. A good training plan also leads to visible results so it can also help motivate you to complete your next workout. Once you notice that you’re getting stronger than before or your life is changing in the direction you want it to, there’ll be no stopping you!
Fitness Motivation with foodspring
The foodspring fitness community is constantly growing with our followers documenting their fitness lifestyles with photos and videos and celebrating each other’s successes. In the foodspring magazine, our exercise and nutrition experts report on effective training, motivation, relaxation, health, current food and fitness trends, and everything you need to know about workouts and health.
A feeling of community and the shared interest in exercise and healthy eating can move mountains. Become part of the #foodspringfamily and follow us on Instagram and Facebook. Whenever you’re not in the mood to work out or find yourself making excuses, let us and our followers motivate you to keep going!
Sources for this article
We at foodspring use only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read our editorial policy to learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.