A time to reboot

Now that the second wave is ebbing, it seems like the best time to reset one’s lifestyle and get into healthier, fitter routines. Easier said than done? We provide a practical guide to fitness.

Choosing your battle is half-way to winning and by this, I mean when you choose to put your step forward for what you desire, you shift your decision from remaining the same to making the effort to change. And the pillar of your decision is — finding your why and knowing what matters the most.

Find your why

Discovering your why not only guides you through every step you take, but it also helps you progress with a clear vision. Similarly, your why in fitness gives your fitness a purpose that leads you to take the steps towards how to set your fitness habit and follow through.

Finding your why will ensure your commitment to fitness. When the reasons (why) behind your intention to change is vague, it is easier to get caught up in excuses and never being able to bring yourself to the point of doing specific things to get positive results. Without craving, there is no action (routine), and the craving lies in defining your why.

The greater the craving, the stronger the habit.

Start small

Habits like fitness establish a sense of self-improvement and it’s an investment that will reap major benefits in the future for your health, both mentally and physically. Any change looks uncomfortable in the beginning. Working out too is no different. Anything new looks tough in the beginning and that is why it requires a result-oriented strategy.

Any change or modification in your regular lifestyle doesn’t come naturally. Whether you want to lose the extra kilos or want a fitter body, a change that focuses on reaching smaller fitness goals can work as a huge motivating factor as this gives you a sense of accomplishment.

Start as small as you can — maybe walking a kilometre a day, going for a jog for ten minutes, anything that you can do without even putting much effort. And once you can do the minimum work without even thinking about it as a task, it falls into your routine. You feel more confident about your progress and that works as a motivational perk. You are exercising to challenge your body and get fitter by raising your capacity. It will get better with time, and every time you will have to pull yourself out of your comfort zone.

It is never going to be easy but starting small and gradually building up momentum will help you sustain the journey.

Define your cue and routine

To master your fitness habits, start by fixing the first important thing — the cue. Once you have fixed the cue, it becomes easier to follow the same cue that leads you to the routine. The more obvious your cue is, the lesser are the chances of missing out on your routine. Choose a time, or place, or preceding action to define your cue.

Tying your fitness habit with a particular time and place helps you make your habit obvious. Pick a time when you are least cluttered with other commitments. For example, if you are an early riser and you can find time to go for a morning walk just after brushing your teeth or finishing your morning tea, follow that cue (just after finishing your morning tea) regularly to start your morning walk routine.

Similarly, it could be right after breakfast, right after you get up from the bed and freshen up, or it could be when you get home from work. Define your cue, be consistent, and let that be a reminder for you to start your routine, every single day. Once your cue is defined, it gets easier to follow through with the routine.

Attach your routine with a reward

Connecting your workout with a reward motivates you to follow the routine. Working out is tough and that’s the reason why many people can’t continue it for a long haul. But when you tie your workout with some kind of a reward — whether it is to lose weight, look better, improve your health or just plain feel good — you're more likely to stick to it. Or even better, try to make your workout something that gives you a sense of accomplishment, a feel-good factor in your life.

The reward you receive from working out determines the continuity of your routine. As a matter of fact, most people quit as the routine gets boring even when they have a defined reward. This is why it is crucial to not let your routine get stale with monotony and boredom. Get creative with your workouts. Mix up your workouts with something fun so that it becomes less of a tedious workout session and more like a challenging yet fun activity that leads you towards your goal. If you ask seasoned exercisers, you will find they are always looking for something new — trying to reach new fitness goals, make their fitness routine fun, challenge their bodies so that they don’t fall into the rut and have fun while working out. The experience they go through from the change in their routine such as learning a new form of fitness, challenging their body differently, achieving different fitness results, work as added perks — a new form of reward.

Build a craving

Though you may have a cue, routine, and reward in place for your fitness habit to develop, unless you have a craving for the reward, you will not find the urge to perform the fitness routine. We tend to continue what we once liked, i.e., the satisfactory reward.

The sense of craving for a reward makes us continue to return to the routine we had previously performed to get the same reward. Satisfaction from receiving a reward invokes motivational stimuli that lead us to replicate the same fitness activity and to shape a craving that is the key to forming a fitness habit. Craving is the significant driving force and the second stage in your fitness habit.

There is no urge to respond or act without a craving. It happens in the brain and allows the habit loop to begin. It is not the habit that we long for, but the change or feeling of an inner state. Similarly, you may not like the exhaustion working out can cause, but you start longing for the satisfaction you get after finishing a gruelling and sweaty workout session.

Associate your workout with an intrinsic reward, something that you like as a reward and the feeling it delivers every time you work out to make it a consistent practice. It could be the feeling of accomplishment, getting closer to the goal or just plain feeling active. Once you associate what you like after you finish a workout, you crave the feeling and that becomes the driving force to make fitness a lifestyle choice.

Make your workout look easy

While the reward plays an important role in making fitness a habit, making your workout look easy to continue, fun or meaningful to you is another thing that keeps you going. If you are a beginner, a full-fledged HIIT workout might scare you off. Rather trying something fun and sustainable to perform will make your body and mind want to continue doing it day after day.

The key to an effective workout is to know your current limits, put enough repetitions, and refinement to strengthen your competence level, and then expand your limits further. Design your workouts at a smaller level, get to know your capabilities, and then step up to the next level. This way, there is less chance of you going out of control, sacrificing precision and failing on your face.

Plan your workout

Planning before you do anything significantly increases the chances of actually completing it. Similarly, having a plan before starting a workout acts as a cue, helping you follow your fitness routine. Our brain is a planning mechanism and when you know what to do and for how long, your brain prompts you to follow the routine.

There may be days you wish to go for a five-kilometre run, but there are days when you struggle to do a half-an-hour workout. Listen to your body and go for a small walk or simple stretching or something very minimal that will make your move but will not suck your energy out. The hope that you will be performing your routine the way you plan serves as a reminder and increases the chances of actually doing it.

Planning your exercise works as a cue to your fitness routine. If we consider motivation as a stimulating factor in performing the exercise behaviour, the cue of planning acts as a bridge that helps you actually perform your exercise.

Stay consistent

The trick to stick to a workout routine is to do as little as you can to make it a consistent affair. Simply following the fitness routine and repeating it, even for a minimum amount of time, helps your brain form your fitness habit. Consistency is crucial in forming any habit like fitness, even when it means going slow. When you are in the stage of making workout a daily lifestyle habit, do it continuously for ninety days. On days when you don’t feel like working out, keep it as minimal as 5 to10 minutes — keep it as simple as a few stretching or a 10-minute strolling. This way you are not breaking your consistency.

The progress achieved is proportional to the consistency maintained. Progress often lies in getting used to the boring process of practising consistently, sticking to the cue, and following your fitness routine. Fitness habits are a form of goal-directed automatic behaviour and consistency in fitness is a ritualistic practice that shapes your fitness habit.

Set realistic goals

The human brain loves to take up challenges that are exciting, demanding, filled with achievements and minimal occasional failures. We enjoy tasks that are challenging enough to test our strengths, but not so challenging that we are likely to face serious failure and constant troubles. Setting a realistic goal for your fitness where you define how far you can go in how long is what decides your success.

Planning your goals and expecting the temporary falls along the way is a realistic approach towards achieving anything you set your mind on. Sometimes the progress can be slow, it may feel exhausting, you may stumble along the way, you may be temporarily derailed — but it’s all a part of the journey. The difference between failure and success is how fast you pick yourself up from the fall and keep going instead of quitting.

Imagine you have a goal of losing 15 kg weight. It may seem unrealistic if you see from where you stand right now if you don’t know where to start from, which exercises to do, how to do, for how long and in which intensity. You need a plan, a workout schedule to move forward every day, every week, and months to reach the goal you are aspiring to achieve.

Be analytical about what is working for you and what isn’t, because if you are setting yourself up with goals that are too big to achieve, you are planning for a fall and this might make you feel like a failure. Pushing your limit is a powerful metric to step up your fitness game but knowing how far you should push your limits ensures knowing your boundaries and progressing towards a realistic goal. Remember, if you lay a brick every day, soon you'll have a wall.

Your environment is your motivator

Our environment is like a magnet; it shapes our behaviour and helps us build better habits, molds our emotions, belief system, attitude, our inspiration, the standards, and expectations we set for ourselves. What we mean by the environment is the people we are surrounded with, the kind of habits they follow, their behavioural pattern — all of this makes an impact on the way we develop our habits.

It is unlikely to find someone who isn’t influenced by anyone in his whole life. For example, merely working out with friends makes us workout as regularly and put in the reps, even when it gets harder. Or running with our friends makes us run faster. We tend to learn things faster when we have a community that shares similar interests as we do. Having a support group in our close setup has an extremely powerful effect when they share similar goals and vibes.

Sometimes having the back of others seems to be motivating whereas in the same situation, if we are placed alone, we might lack motivation and act differently. The wisdom of crowds, of course, is often a much-celebrated phenomenon.

While we like to adopt the behaviours of others, habits like fitness can be an interesting example to show how we try to perform similar to the person we like, or how we try to outperform them sometimes. When we workout with our friends, we want to be treated as equal and do not want to look inferior. As a general rule, having someone else to equate ourselves with matters a lot, and this, as a matter of fact, makes it easier to develop habits like fitness. We want to match pace, never want to lag behind.

Track your progress

When your reward is approaching, stopping is not a choice. The principle of measuring your fitness progress is to minimise the number of slips and increase the number of small successes. It fuels the desire to keep your exercise routine regular — from beginning with a tiny jog, home workouts, or spending thirty minutes on any workout at the gym. Many, including elite athletes, trust this method because monitoring changes is one of the most successful ways to prevent yourself from being demotivated. It stands as proof of your hard work and consistency.

It serves as a mechanism to make your fitness habits more addictive. When you feel low or the conditions are adverse, it is easy to slip off the track. But assessing your progress is a gentle reminder to hark back quickly so that you do not lose it all.

When you start to train, it's like turning on the power mode. Something new starts happening in your body and it goes through subtle changes, slowly moves into the active zone which your body wasn’t aware of. But after a few workouts, a few days, a few weeks or a few months, your body starts to realise how to stabilise that and process into the system as a new addition to your lifestyle.

In the early phases of establishing your fitness routines, there is still a big blob of discontentment. You expect a rapid change in your body. And during the initial phase, it's shocking how pointless and minuscule the changes may appear, making you feel your efforts are inefficacious. You fail to fathom whether you are even making progress or stuck, it feels disheartening.

Keeping a track of your progress, from how much you can lift from the previous week/month, how many reps you can do without gasping for breath, to how long you can go on with a workout without giving up. Your progress chart makes you realise how far you have come.

Nothing goes in vain; nothing gets wasted. Even your small attempts make a difference.

Conquer, don’t compare

We are constantly comparing ourselves without considering our progress. We often lose the perception of ourselves, our struggles, our achievements, and progress. We feel so dissatisfied, unworthy, and futile that we repeatedly find ourselves gyrating in the vicious cycle of comparison. We are chasing the game of perfection, swept away by the clamour of the crowd. It is difficult to consider your journey as meaningful when we are surrounded by the glamour of standardised success — from luminous career choices to extravagant materialistic acquisitions. And this creates a dilemma when your efforts start looking much lesser than others, your progress seems trivial compared to others, your achievements appear inconsequential compared to the rest. Comparing yourself to others creates an illusion that you are inferior to others while it’s a false belief we allow to grow within us. It makes you look inferior instead of recognising the beauty and value of your own uniqueness.

Go ahead if you want to admire others on their fitness achievements, their progress, and their hard work, but don’t bog yourself down comparing your efforts with them. Rather, get inspired, and do better. Get motivated to reach their level, learn things that brought them to that fitness level and try to improve as you move ahead.

Fitness takes time to show aesthetic outcomes but valuing only the aesthetics will not take you far. The journey towards making fitness a conscious lifestyle choice takes you through a lot of changes from improving your mood to making mindful food choices, better sleep quality, improved lifestyle habits, better time management, better productivity level, and so on. These don’t happen overnight. Your journey becomes more meaningful when you constantly put your step forward, come what may.

You may ask, “If I don’t compare my body with someone else’s, who do I compare myself to?”

The answer is — the past YOU!

Take a step from wherever you stand and stay consistent to improve every time you go for a workout. That’s when you grow, you shed your old skin and become a better version of yourself, you become the conqueror.

There is no one way to succeed. There will always be someone else who will be doing better than you. The only way to reach your fitness goal is to follow the path you have chosen for yourself because when you choose something for yourself, you put your faith and effort into bringing the best out of it. You shine.

Every effort matters when you choose fitness as a lifestyle. You progress every day when you choose to go ahead with your workout, even for ten minutes. Your small efforts with consistency weave your progress together and you succeed in the way you always wanted to. Developing fitness habits is just the beginning of bringing immense goodness into your life. It instigates many small habits that cumulatively lead you to the fitness results you desire. There is no good or bad workout. No workout should ever feel or look like a chore or a punishment.

Staying fit is a reward that you are bestowing on your body. Enjoy every little progress as a step to success and build your fitness habit stronger with every move.

Excerpted with permission from 'Fitness Habits — Breaking The Barriers To Fitness' published by Srishti Publishers.

Amaresh is an IIM Bengaluru alumnus and founder of India’s largest fitness discovery platform, Gympik. Subhra is a creative writer, storyteller and fitness enthusiast.