As a Body Positive Personal Trainer in Ontario, I know that motivation is the number one problem faced by the women I work with every single day in my practice. I often hear them say things like:
“I wish I felt motivated to exercise.”
“I just can’t stick to anything more than a few weeks or months.”
And my very favorite: “I just need you to hold me accountable.”
Many of us know working out can be a great way to reduce and manage stress, care for our bodies and improve overall mental health. But why is it SO hard for some of us to get motivated to exercise?
In this blog post, we will explore the top five reasons why you may not feel motivated to work out and what you can do about it.
Prefer to listen? Check out this podcast I recorded on The Joyful Movement Show on this topic.
The Start Stop Cycle
The start and stop cycle sort of goes like this: You purchase a new piece of equipment or a new program, maybe join a new gym. You buy a fancy planner to schedule your workouts and even set some goals for yourself. You feel full of excitement and ready to go!
Then, after a few weeks or months, for reasons you don’t quite understand, the motivation to exercise dwindles. It becomes harder and harder to gear yourself up to work out. You start to need to talk yourself into it or even try to bribe yourself-“if I just do this, then I can earn a glass of wine for later.” Does this sound familiar? Eventually, you start skipping workouts altogether, making excuses to your friends or your coach.
At this point, you begin to dread the thought of working out because you feel so far behind from your “plan” and that you are starting from scratch! You know the workouts will feel hard again, and you worry about the muscle soreness…so you just push your next planned workout off for a later time.
Then, the guilt sets in. It can feel incredibly disheartening to want to be working out and buckling into a routine, only to stray away from the plan and feel like you have failed. You might look for comfort in things like food or alcohol, trying to make yourself feel better temporarily, but it often ends up making you feel even worse. In this place of guilt and disappointment, it can be hard to find the motivation to start exercising again. So, you start to look for another program. Something different. Something to create another spark of motivation. And the cycle starts again.
The Top 5 Reasons Why You Can’t Get Motivated to Exercise
There’s a reason why so many of us repeat the start-and-stop cycle when it comes to exercise. As a Body Positive Personal Trainer in Ontario, I’m here today to help you break it.
1. Exercise Feels Like Torture
You have a belief that exercise has to be hard in order to be effective and that you have to kill it every time you go out.
2. You Can’t Find the Time
You believe you have to work out an hour a day. And if you can’t do a full hour, there’s no point.
3. You Don’t Feel Like You Fit In
The programs or classes you’ve tried are either highly competitive or feel like punishment. You don’t feel really good when you do them. You compare yourself to those in the program or class with you and feel like you belong.
4. You Don’t Know What You are Doing
You lack the skill and confidence to exercise it on your own. You don’t know where to start and feel embarrassed asking for help.
5. You’re Focused on the Outcome of Losing or Maintaining Your Weight
You believe that exercise is a means to an end, a way to burn calories or earn food. You equate exercise with changing your weight, shape or size without much thought to the intrinsic benefits.
How to Actually Get Motivated to Exercise
Everyone seeks motivation, but many of us don’t realize there are two distinct kinds: intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is that inner drive to do something for the sheer joy it brings – an elusive yet desirable state we all strive for. Contrastingly, extrinsic motivates from external factors like rewards, performance goals, and changing your body’s weight, shape, or size; also think about enjoying your workout buddies or aiming to improve health markers.
Researchers have uncovered that the best motivation comes from both intrinsic and extrinsic sources. While improved health outcomes and enhanced physical fitness are positive drivers towards staying active, focusing on external elements like appearance or weight loss didn’t provide enough incentive to be consistent long term. It’s clear we need more than just one source of inspiration – an inner push combined with tangible rewards can help sustain our commitment to the joyful movement.
So how do we get that inner push? Feeling empowered and connected drives our intrinsic motivation to exercise – that’s the takeaway from Self-Determination Theory. Competence, belonging, and autonomy all contribute to staying active long-term; an inspiring study in Sports Medicine International found this was true even 10 years later! So when it comes to getting motivated to exercise, don’t forget how important these factors are!
The Fitness Industry is Designed for you to Fail
The traditional fitness industry is driven by an unhealthy pursuit of weight loss and toning, ignoring the importance of feeling successful while engaging in physical activity. This approach promotes a diet culture that places value on thinness over true health; even if you aren’t aware of it or identify as someone trying to reach this “ideal,” chances are we have all been impacted in some way.
Even though science has proven that weight loss and appearance goals have a negative effect on motivation. And I’m gonna be bold here and say that that’s exactly what they want, because if you run out of motivation and fail, then you’ll need to come back and purchase their service again, and again, and again.
I’m willing to bet that all the times that you’ve quit or given up on your goals, it’s because you were chasing health in the form of thinness and engaging in restrictive eating or hardcore exercise that you hated. It’s not your fault. It’s just diet culture at work. It’s so deeply ingrained in us. It’s usually all we know.
Your brain may be overwhelmed with questions on how to find the motivation for joyful movement and exercise. It’s totally understandable that if you’ve never had a positive experience, it can take time to break free from old habits of disliking physical activity. But there is hope – when we feel good and enjoy exercise, we’re much more likely to feel motivated to participate.
It’s hard to get motivated to exercise when you don’t feel confident, have time constraints, or find the whole process torturous. If you can focus on intrinsic motivators, like finding movement that brings you joy and feels good- instead of extrinsic ones like weight loss goals, you are more likely to maintain the motivation required to make working out a part of your regular routine. As a Body Positive Personal Trainer in Ontario, I offer a free guide that goes into more detail about how you can find intrinsic motivators that work for you. Grab your copy today and learn more about what might be holding you back from staying motivated to exercise.
