New Year gym motivation.

A few tips for New Year's motivation.

By Luke Ursell

So I’ve recently been asked to write a blog post on gym motivation and how do you drag your ass to the gym when being an adult all day has left you drained?

One idea I have always thought about is that motivation is basically nonsense! Motivation to me is waiting until you feel good before you go and do what you know you need to, for me consistency and good habits are what will carry you forward.

People seem to have this “go hard or go home” attitude when it comes to the gym, well I got news for you, more of then than not, you go home.

Not every workout needs to be cheerleaders, fireworks and personal bests. What’s wrong with practicing good human movement, being reasonable about your intensities and going home feeling better than you walked in.

Here’s the problem; that just isn’t sexy enough, I can’t sell you an idea about being reasonable with your exercises programme, believe me I wish I could.

We’ve all been there, you hit the gym hard, you crush all your bests, you lift more weight for more reps than you’ve ever done, you smash sprints on the treadmill become Thor and leave a sweaty mess feeling amazing and accomplished!

Here’s the problem, that only really happens less than one in twenty workouts.

You tell yourself that every workout from now on is going to be just like that.

Now this should be obvious and I hate to break it to you, but you can’t. What happens the day after? When your body is sore and your energy levels are low? Usually you skip the gym entirely deciding to instead treat yourself with a rather large take away for all your hard work.

Do you see the issue here?

Now I like HIIT training, I do but some tv gurus would have you believe you can do these high intensity, high impact training sessions 7 days a week, and the truth is you can’t.

Take a look at some of the best athletes in the world, some days they won’t go more than 50%, in fact many professional athletes train to controlled percentages in where they rarely exceed 80% of their best, for whatever reason training sub-maximally has a positive effect on our maximum efforts, without destroying a persons nervous system.

As strength coach Dan John says “little and often over the long haul will beat short bouts of high intensity exercise”

Actor Terry Crews has some fantastic advice for building a habit, in an article his point was that you should go to the gym, each and every day, and if you didn’t feel like training, well you didn’t train. You would go every day at the same time to build the habit, sometimes you would train, and others you would sit in the coffee shop and read the paper. The genius in this is in its simplicity, you’re building a habit. People know not to bother you because you’re in the gym, and you will find yourself more and more in the actual gym itself rather than the coffee shop or the sauna.

Any successful person, be it in fitness, business or married life, knows that it’s not motivation that gets results, its habit and consistency.

A holiday romance may be all love during the holiday, but can it handle the day to day stresses of married life?

So here’s some of my top tips to keep you on track:

1. Create a plan – something about planning your workouts tends to keep you on track, it takes out much of the stress of walking into the gym and then wondering what you’re going to do.

2. Decide of a time that works for you and commit to going to the gym each and every day – even if it’s not to use the weight room, the habit WILL make a different.

3. Use moderate loading and intensities – I know you want to train like Hercules every time you step foot in the gym, but save yourself, rarely go over 85% of your best, you can go all out at 100% once every few months, maybe even longer for experienced trainees.

4. Be kind to yourself – if you miss a workout, studies have shown that people who tend not to beat themselves up about making mistakes tend to get back on the horse quicker than those who do, I would highly recommend any work by Dr Kristin Neff on this subject.

5. Keep your HIIT training down to two maybe three times a week depending on your goal and work on your mobility and fundamental human movements (you may want to check out my “laws of the fitness industry” article for reference) okay it’s not as sexy or easy to sell, but it will provide results.

Hopefully this blog post has given some clarity to this ever complex industry, If you have any questions feel free to send me a message via the contact section of this site, or by my social media platforms.

Results Personal Training Studio, Darley Abbey.

www.derbypersonaltrainer.co.uk