Staying Motivated When Motivation is Low

Staying motivated can be difficult, especially if you are motivating yourself. It’s easy to talk yourself into a day off here, cookie there, and before you know it you have gained all that weight back that you have worked all summer to keep off. With the school year starting and the holiday season around the corner I’m going to talk about a couple things you can do to stay motivated when the motivation is low.

• Get a Workout Partner : Having a workout partner can help increase motivation, adherence, and accountability. Choose someone who’s at a similar fitness level and has comparable goals. By holding each other accountable to show up for workouts, it can be easier to push one another to be better. Having a support system will help keep you motivated and get you through your low times.
• Change your routine up: Repeating the same thing day in and day out can get maddening. Change the time of day you go workout. If you typically workout in the mornings, try switching it up and go to the gym in the evenings. You would be surprised how much a change of scenery with different faces can help motivate you. Another way to change your routine is to reduce your time spent in the gym. Stick to your workout routines, but decrease your resting time and try to get through your workout faster. If you’re doing a cardio workout, increase your intensity and go harder for a shorter duration. These little changes can help push you to get back on track.
• Hire a Personal Trainer: Sometimes you just get stuck in a rut that’s hard to pull yourself out of by yourself. Hiring a Personal Trainer can help you gain a different perspective, provide fresh energy and motivation, and can give you critical emotional support. A Personal Trainer that you trust can add important technique tips and new workout routines to not only improve the quality of your workouts, but also the novelty of them.
• Change your workouts: Change your workouts completely. If you’ve been lifting heavy set the weights aside and take a week to a month of body weight workouts and / or light weight high repetition circuit training. If you have been hitting the cardio hard reduce your mileage and add a couple days a week of cross training or weight lifting. These are good things to implement into a regular workout routine anyways. Recovery workouts are imperative to not get burnt out, staying healthy and injury free.
• Set goals: This is probably the most important tool you can use to stay motivated. Goals are a great way to stay motivated, stay on track, and to have something to work towards. When setting a goal it’s essential that you make them reasonable and achievable. I suggest setting a long-term goal that will take a couple of months or more to achieve. Setting short term goals along the way will help you accomplish your long term goal. When you finally achieve that long-term goal, be sure to reward yourself!

Holiday Reward System

Starting October 1 st ending December we are implementing a reward system at Elite Nutrition and Performance for all Clients. You will be able to earn points for different tasks achieved. For example, attending a training session during the week is 1 point, attending a ENP grocery store tour is 1 point, reviewing our trainers on Facebook is 1 point and so on. At the end of each month the client with most points will receive a reward! At the end of our holiday season (December) we will have a December winner and then an overall winner who has earned the most points over all three months. We want to encourage our clients to stay healthy and motivated through the hard holiday months.