It is always good to have a trainer while working out. A professional who can push you harder and don’t let stop until your body says otherwise. But what if you don’t have a trainer or a workout buddy? How will you motivate yourself to workout alone?
Here are 10 practical tips to help you stay motivated and committed to your fitness routine when you’re working out alone.
1. Keep Your Workouts in Check
Use a notebook, a diary, or anything to keep a track of your body measurements, weight, and all the training activity.
If you don’t want to do it manually, use a smartwatch!
As you progress in your fitness journey, keep noting your weight and body measurements either weekly or monthly. This will provoke you by a sense of understanding that your hard work is paying off, so you keep pushing yourself to work out daily.
If you don’t know how to maintain an effective manual journal of workouts, check out a short video below:
2. Make a Plan and Stick to it!
Plan for yourself how many days you want to workout in a week. Schedule your workout timings in a calendar. List down the exercises to do and execute those planned exercises.
Planning and staying consistent with your plans is the key to success.
Trick your brain into thinking that at this particular time the most important thing in life is to go exercise.
If someday you couldn’t fulfill your plan, keep a backup plan of what now? Maybe workout at a different time on the same day.
Just make sure that your backup plan is not something that can make things difficult e.g. if you missed 20 pushups in a day, don’t just add them to your next day’s workout if they are too strenuous on your body.
Instead, you can give a small amount of charity as a punishment, or anything that can discipline you for the next workout.
You can even ignore it every once in a while and continue your regular workout from the next day without anything extra.
The goal should be to keep yourself in a workout routine with discipline.
3. Set Goals for Yourself
While working out alone, it is always in prospect to become lazy and demotivated to work out. One way of staying active and achieving fitness goals is to set goals for yourself.
The main characteristic of a goal is to keep it SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound).
Check out a 6 minutes video below on how you can make your fitness goals SMART:
Your goal can be anything small or big depending on your endurance, stamina, and willpower.
Like signing yourself up for a competition and pushing yourself harder because there will be people looking at your performance.
Or it can be as small as doing a plank for a minute or two every day without taking a break.
Whatever sounds fun and seems achievable, make it a part of your everyday workout ritual.
Setting fitness goals are very important. Check out a short video on the importance of setting fitness goals below:
4. Reward Yourself
Rewarding yourself does not mean eating chocolate every time you work out. Try setting up days for when you want to work out and once you fulfill those targets, give yourself a. day off, go out for dinner, eat something you love, buy yourself something, or anything that can cheer you up!
You can even cook a tasty post-workout dinner for yourself.
Just make sure the reward you set is good enough to sweat yourself for it. Just a mediocre reward may cause you to let it go and not want it.
And if you are the kind of person who doesn’t thrive on rewards, try the complete opposite of sticking yourself but not in a way that is self-harming. Like, punish yourself to take 15 minutes to walk.
5. Think of Small Achievements
Rome was not built in a single day. Your fitness goals are the same. And this is no mental trick, setting a bigger goal is great but to encourage yourself at the initial stage you need to achieve several small goals.
These small goals are helpful in chasing big accomplishments later on.
So don’t push yourself too hard too early or it can lead to issues like fatigue and exhaustion which can totally halt your workouts.
6. Challenge Yourself Gradually
Gradually with time, start tricking yourself into small challenges such as ‘do 20 extra burpees’, ‘run for 10 minutes longer, ‘do another 20 pushups’, or whatever may seem like a task doable.
Once your body is ready for the extra, you will find yourself in a different mental state. An accomplished one!
7. Create a Workout-Friendly Space
Pick a spot in your house for working out. An area you will be most comfortable in and easy to workout without any distraction.
You can make that little space up for yourself even in your room or living room.
But it will be much better if you can dedicate a special space to it.
Like a separate room or a terrace if you are very fond of fresh air. This could be a real motivation and every time you go to that space, your mind will get tricked into accepting that this place is for workouts only.
You’ll be much more comfortable working out in that dedicated space.
8. Give Time to Yourself
Initially, if you find things hard to do, take them slow and easy. Do not be harsh on yourself and don’t tire yourself to exhaustion. Give time to your body to adjust with exercises progressively.
You might feel very stiff in the beginning. Just give your body time to open up to regular exercise.
9. Focus on the Betterment of Yourself
As you progress into your fitness journey, you need to value yourself as your body and mind are working hard to attain the set achievements.
Do things that make you happy and relaxed.
Don’t overburden yourself with excessive pressure or it will ruin your sustainability.
Remember all the hard work will be of use if YOU are healthy and happy! Sometimes your body gets used to workouts but the brain is not happy with all the hard work going on.
Focus on the betterment of body and mind equally.
10. Make Mental Toughness a Habit
All it requires is WILL POWER, that is what can just get you through any milestone. It requires training but most of all, persistent effort towards your goal. Try doing one thing every day that pushes you, or something you fear.
Waking up every day means giving yourself a new opportunity to try out new things or struggle with your fears and desires.
It may be average at the start, but sooner or later you will vanquish it all!
Pushing yourself for the better version and being your own BOSS is the utmost aspect of self-love and encouragement. To train alone is a skill of art and is very difficult to attain.
Just have strong willpower, you can do it!
Some other Issues related to Motivating yourself to workout alone:
1. How To Trick The Brain into Exercise?
You can trick your brain to exercise by creating an environment where your brain is not focused on the stress and hardships of exercise. Like if you can’t do a set of 22 reps with dumbbells, maybe putting on the headphones, playing your favorite song, and then lifting the dumbbells can be the trick to get the set done.
You need such tricks because naturally the brain is built to protect against threats. Even the ones that don’t exist.
And fear is only a chemical reaction going through the mind. It requires a lot of courage to get over it and do things that your brain is not comfortable doing.
Unlike the hard route of overcoming fears with courage, it is better to take the help of mental tricks sometimes.
Those small distractions like music and podcasts while working out can be the mental tricks your brain can thrive on.
Amishi Jha, a neuroscientist in her TED talk said that attention is the boss of your brain, wherever it goes the rest of your brain follows.
Check out her talk on “How to tame your wandering mind” in the video below, it can be a great mental trick to take your mind off the struggles of exercise, and do it:
Such mental tricks are helpful in grabbing the brain’s attention and channeling it to get the hard things done.
