Tired of telling yourself you'll start tomorrow, but tomorrow never comes? Use these 5 tips.

“Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live.” -Jim Rohn

Sometimes the hardest thing about creating new habits is just getting started. Telling ourselves we don’t know what to do or where to start is enough to keep us on the sidelines. A strong toned body is created through a strong mind. Here are 5 tips to get started and stay consistent.

Define your Why clearly

The most important thing you can start with is a clear understanding of why you want to change your life. It can be to get healthy, live longer, or just because you want to be confident showing off your body in a bathing suit. All of those reasons are equally as valuable as the other if that’s truly what you want.

Finding motivation and getting excited about a new challenge will get you started but it will not last a lifetime. Having a very strong and clear why will.

Take someone who has just been told by his doctor that if he doesn’t change his diet and sedentary lifestyle he will die in 6 months. The thought of losing his family and forcing his kids and wife to go on without him is going to become a very strong incentive to make exercise and healthy eating a habit.

That frame of reference will get him into the gym on the days when he really doesn’t feel like going. When he tries to talk himself out of going he can remind himself of all the important reasons he started in the first place. To be a better father and husband who gets to spend more time with his family.

Most of us will not have as powerful a why as that but our why is just as valuable and important for our journey. The purpose is to have clarity and conviction for why your lifestyle change is meaningful to you. It’s not a matter of if it will be hard but when, inevitably you will want to quit and give up at some point.

Any new pursuit that’s challenging will cause a little voice in our head to get louder, the one that only wants to keep us safe by maintaining the boundaries of our comfort zone. It tells us to slow down and take a day off, it’s not that important, this is going to be too hard. A strong and clear why will be the megaphone that drowns out that voice of fear and discomfort that’s telling you to stop.

Find your why and focus on the feeling it gives when you contemplate it. Our emotions will always serve as a stronger impulse for behavior change than logic. Whenever you think about quitting revisit your why and that feeling it gives you and treat it as your North Star in times of tension.

“Don’t be pushed around by the fears in your mind, be led by the dreams in your heart.” - Roy T. Bennett

Be specific about your schedule

Making a definite schedule for the week is the best thing you can do to not only start but keep a new routine. Telling yourself you’re going to workout 3 times a week this month is a great start but it’s not as effective as this; “I will go to the gym Monday, Wednesday, and Friday this week at 6 o’clock right after work. I will perform 10 minutes on cardio and 20 minutes lifting weights.”

After that intention has been completed it’s time to leave, that goal for the day has been accomplished and you should feel proud. Anything more than what you stated you would do is irrelevant to the written goal and therefore not necessary.

Let that win for the day satisfy you and leave you wanting to do more, now is not the time to add excessive work. You don’t need it right now.

For more reading about habits visit https://jamesclear.com/implementation-intentions.

Writing these clear intentions down week by week is a good idea if you have a schedule that normally fluctuates day by day. If your schedule is very consistent that you have more freedom to plan for longer periods.

Whether you have a consistent schedule or not setting some time to plan for the week is always a good idea and will prime your focus for the upcoming days. A good way to keep these intentions in place is to set them in your calendar or as a reminder.

The calendar is a good idea because when are we ever motivated to go to the doctor’s office, dentist, DMV, or [insert boring task that must be done]? Usually never if you’re the average person but when we have an appointment set, with the exception of any unforeseeable circumstances, we are going to show up.

Setting up your workouts as a task you have to do takes the decision away and primes your mind to make it to the gym on the day and time you scheduled for yourself.

Start with 2-3 workouts per week

If you are getting serious about making exercise a habit there is no reason to over train. In the beginning, a routine is far more important than the effort, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with starting low and slow.

The first 6 months are going to be the easiest to make gains in strength and muscle size. If you can get results from the least amount of effort why not use that to your advantage?

As time goes on and you become more fit you will naturally start to increase the amount of work you’re doing throughout the week. It can come from adding an extra day or by increasing the duration of each workout.

As a beginner, you’re going to notice improvements in your fitness from workout to workout. The longer you train results will come more slowly and the effort required to continue progressing will have to increase. More variability in your routine starts becoming necessary after 6 months of consistent exercise.

Within that time you can get away with just about anything, just don’t stop. Pick a number (2 or 3) that is most likely to be maintained for 2 months. As your fitness increases the workouts will feel easier but do not be so eager to add workouts just yet.

Add exercises before you start increasing your frequency per week. If you did two workouts for 30 minutes each while performing 4 exercises, keep the two workouts a week but increase your work to 5 exercises.

It may not seem like much but that additional exercise will increase the amount of work you’re doing per month quite substantially.

Anytime your body does something new it will not be prepared for the stress being applied. This is the best way to see improvement while reducing your risk of injury. Play the long game.

\ Small Changes = big results over time

Make it a full-body workout

The lower your frequency of workouts per week the more muscle groups you should train per day. This doesn’t mean the workouts have to be more exhausting than they would otherwise be they will just be more comprehensive.

As your workouts per week increase then it’s time to reduce the amount of muscle groups you’re doing and add more work to those specific body parts. The reason for this is efficiency, as stated above you will get the most improvement in your first few months of training so hitting each muscle group multiple times a week will be more productive than one.

So whether it’s two times a week or three at least every part of your body is going to be stimulated multiple times with enough rest in between.

Believe it or not, this approach will feel much better than single muscle group training. This will be the best way to progress quickly while limiting the excessive accumulation of stress and fatigue. All you need to start is 4-5 exercises that will hit every muscle in the body.

Keep the sets low to start and slowly build over time as the work you’re doing becomes easier. You don’t need to put more work into one particular area of the body at this point, just make sure everything is even and balanced.

Every exercise should be balanced with a movement in the opposite direction. Here are some sample workouts that you can repeat for 3-4 weeks before changing them.

Each exercise can be performed with 2 sets of 15 reps

One final point to consider, this is just a starting point and should not be used indefinitely. Your training should always be evolving so don’t get locked into doing the same exact thing for extended periods of time.

Do exercises you enjoy

If you’re very new to exercise and you have never lifted weights then you won’t know what you like and what you don’t. In this case, try different exercises each time you go to the gym and take mental notes. The goal is to make this routine as smooth as possible for the first two to three months.

As previously stated, just getting started and doing something consistently will provide great results but the best returns come after years of training. Starting with exercises that you feel comfortable with and give you a sense of pleasure will be the most important to repeat.

At the end of the day this is all about you, sure there may be more optimal ways to train and some exercises are better than others but none of that matters if you don’t want to do it. The best routines are the ones that you stick to.

As exercising becomes more of a habit you will naturally start progressing into more challenging exercises and the overall intensity of your workouts will increase as well. The goal is to stick around long enough for all the work you’re putting in to start compounding.

People naturally gravitate towards things that make us feel good and we stay away from things that don’t. If you can structure your exercise in a way that makes you feel good while you’re doing it the chances of you continuing to do it goes up. The beauty of going to the gym instead of working out at home is the variety of weights and machines you can choose from.

Find your exercises and make it a goal to get good at them, the more you practice the better it will feel. This is your journey so make it what you want it to be but always stay open to learning and changing along the way.

• Summary of main points

  1. “Having a strong enough why can withstand any how.”
  2. Schedule your workouts like you would any other appointment to prime yourself to show up. Just showing up is 80% of life.
  3. 2-3 workouts a week is enough to increase your fitness week by week without adding any unnecessary fatigue.
  4. To make a routine pick 4-5 exercises that target your whole body, that will be enough to progress.
  5. Exercise should be enjoyable, make sure this is your primary focus in the beginning. Pick exercises you like doing and repeat them.

• Call to action

  If you have been wanting to get in shape and catch people’s attention then put some serious thought into why you feel the desire to do so. Explore the reasons that give you an emotional reaction, the more intense the better. Let them guide you in defining why you want to change your habits and your life. Then start planning your weekly schedule with the specific days and times you will go to the gym. Whenever you start to feel overwhelmed, stressed, or tired, revisit those emotional triggers for why you started and refocus on your weekly workout appointments.