Motivation to Exercise – How Your Brain Can Help You Find It

Regular exercise isn’t about “willpower” and “pushing through”. All you need is a diary and an understanding of how your brain works.

“I’ll really start in the new year/on the first/at the solstice/after my birthday/when Jupiter returns to the night sky.” Sure you will. Except that, for some reason, it’s still today, and today you really can’t be bothered.

We won’t leave you to it alone, and we’ll tell you what’s going on in your body when you can’t make yourself exercise, how to get it done and, above all, how to keep going.

There is no perfect moment to start

You come back from holiday and it’s the day you’re supposed to hit the gym in the early evening. But your first Monday back at work turned out to be one where you had to stay late, and suddenly the workout is off. And maybe you didn’t really feel like training anyway, and the delay came in handy. You get home after dark and treat yourself to a not exactly nutritious meal, because today doesn’t count yet, since you didn’t train.

That’s exactly the spiral we want to get out of.

Waiting for the ideal moment creates the illusion in our heads that we’re actually doing something. That we’re “already working on it”, when in reality the only things working are our mouth and vocal cords. Besides, let’s be honest: when has the ideal moment for anything ever come along in our lives? Exactly.

Adding exercise to our routine cannot depend on an external event or a date in the calendar. Quite the opposite. Schedule your start at the gym precisely when your calendar is packed. If you can find room for it now, you really won’t have an excuse when things get easier.

So how do you “force” yourself to exercise?

Did you notice the word routine above? Our brain is highly malleable: it loves patterns and gets used to repeated events easily. If we randomly feed it cheap dopamine throughout the day through phone apps, caffeine, alcohol or nicotine, it will keep asking us for those sources again and again.

With elite athletes, everyone celebrates their top results, but far too little is said about consistency. They aren’t consistent because they’re exceptional. They’re exceptional because they’re consistent. Only regular activity tells the brain that from now on this is going to be something natural to us and that it has to reprogram itself accordingly.

Research shows that if we start exercising at the same time of day 3 – 4x a week, a so-called anticipatory circuit forms. That means your brain gradually gets used to the fact that at seven in the morning we go and lift iron and, even if you’re not a morning person, a few minutes before training you start to feel a rush of dopamine. It’s released before the reward itself actually arrives. Much like when you know your favourite meal will be brought to your table in a few minutes.

So let’s use that to our advantage.

The foundation is building a habit that relieves the brain of constantly deciding whether to go and train at all. Just as you don’t think about every press of the clutch when driving and every gear change, over time you’ll stop thinking about whether you’ll go to training at all. You simply go, because it’s written in your calendar and, actually, you’re already quite looking forward to it. And even if you aren’t, you go anyway, because you know that in the changing room you’ll suddenly feel like it.

It’s important to get a good night’s sleep for it

And not to train right before bed. “I’ll go to the gym in the evening, wreck myself and pass out nicely,” everyone has said, but nobody fell asleep before one or two. Given your circadian rhythm (the internal clock your whole self runs on) the ideal is to get your workout done within three hours of waking up. That’s when your body has the most energy and, above all, if you end up staying late at work, you won’t lose your training session, because it’s long behind you.

If you train in the morning, adjust the evening before accordingly. Going to bed before midnight is the best thing you can do for your body in the evening. In the first half of the night, deep sleep dominates your sleep cycles, and that’s what you need for proper recovery. If you stay up late, you’ll only sour yourself on a workout that’s just a few hours away.

Training plan:

• Don’t look for the “right time” to start; make training a regular, non-negotiable entry in your diary.
• If you skip a workout, don’t panic that you’re a hopeless person, and don’t jump into binge mode “because why not”. Just don’t skip the next workout. You don’t have to punish yourself for the one you missed.
• Schedule your workouts in the morning, before work. You have one excuse fewer, and there’s nothing better than the sight of sleepy colleagues sipping their coffee when you’ve already trained.
• You don’t have to start with two-a-day triathlon training. If you can manage even two sessions a week, that’s always two more than if you’d, you know, done nothing. And as we say in our community: you can always add more.
• Start TODAY. Finish this article, sit down for half an hour without the internet with a pen and paper, and work out when you can go and train. Then go, then go again, and repeat.
• Get quality sleep with a bedtime before midnight. Don’t look at your phone for an hour before bed. Don’t eat two to three hours before bed. You’ve known all this for ages.
• It’s all about tiny habits that, in the long run, always deliver quality results.