How to Schedule your Workout Program











How to Schedule your Workout Program

You know that exercising is good for you. Most of you are aware of the recommendation from Department of Health and Human Services that you should perform aerobic exercises 3-5 times a week for at least 30 minutes and strength train 2 times a week. Yet most of you find it difficult to follow the recommendation. Why does it happen? You realize that your health is your biggest wealth and should be your top priority, still most of the times you fail to take care of it. The trick is not to know what is the right thing to do rather it is building a framework of habits and schedule for doing the right thing even if is the difficult thing to do. Most of the people who are disciplined build such frameworks to make sure that they don’t deviate from their path. In this article, we will discuss how you can schedule your workout program so that you can stay on track with it.

Many of us download fitness apps or fitness trackers in the hope that these devices will help us stay motivated and regularly exercise. Most often we do manage to work out regularly with these devices. There is no doubt that fitness app and fitness trackers have helped a lot of people to stay on track with their fitness program. However, for many the excitement dies down in sometime and then they get back to their old ways. Everyone can come up with some type of excuse to not workout, but let’s be honest to ourselves, it takes an enormous amount of will power to go workout and sometime we just lack that will power. The thought of packing our gym bag, going to the gym and doing a difficult workout seems very unpleasing when we are comfortably sitting on a couch, enjoying our comfort food and watching our favorite show running on the TV.

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Keep Your Will Power in Mind

When doing a difficult the key thing needed is the will power. Unfortunately, all the psychological research indicates that our will power is limited. To give you an example psychology researchers subjected half of a random group of people to a difficult task of controlling their emotional response while watching a movie and the other half was not asked to do the same. Subsequently both the groups were offered to choose between a healthy snack of apple or an indulgent snack of a cookie. The group which was asked to control their emotional response was more likely to choose a cookie over an apple.

Most of us get derailed from our workout program when something urgent comes up in our life. The experiment described above explains why most of us get distracted from our workout program under such situations. As we get busy, other tasks take up all of our will power and we are no longer left with anymore will power reserves to take ourselves to a gym and workout. Once we are off track with our program, it takes additional will power to get back on track and the task of working out becomes even more difficult. Things just go downhill from there.

So how do we make sure that we stay on track with our workout program without getting distracted when the life gets busy. The trick lies in the way our brain processes will power. Our mind spends will power only on a task that recognizes as new and difficult. There is very little will power expenditure on our routine tasks. As an example we do not spend much of our will power in taking a bath, although a person who does not take a shower daily most certainly will have to spend will power. So to make sure that we perform our workouts regularly we need to make it a routine and easy to perform.

Making Workout Your Routine

The best way to turn your workout into a routine is to add it to your calendar and always make sure to keep it there. Make certain time on certain days of the week your workout times and regularly perform workouts at those times. When your mind knows in advance that you have to perform at workout at a certain time, it will arrange everything in a way that performing a workout will tax your will power to the minimum. Moreover you can add a pre-workout routine to your schedule to program your brain to form a connection. As an example lets say that you perform your workout at 5 pm in the evening, add some other easy ritual such as drinking coffee at that time to trick you mind to associate the coffee and evening atmosphere of people leaving work to trick your mind into getting into the mood to workout.

This trick might sound silly, but believe me it really works. As you brains starts associating these external signal with your workouts your will power expenditure will be reduced significantly. Even if you get busy in between, as most of us inevitably will, when you get free again, that initial inertia to restart the workout program will be much lower and it will be much easier for you to get back on track.

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Making Workout Easy to Perform

Adding the workout to your schedule in itself is not sufficient to make you go to the gym, you also need to make it easy for you to perform your workout. The effort of taking yourself to the place where you workout requires a big expenditure of will power. If it takes you half an hour to get to your gym, then the inertia will be so high for you that you will have to muster a lot of will power to get you to the gym. This is a strategy, which is doomed to fail. The best approach here is to have your workout place either close to your home or your gym.

Some other important things to keep in mind while making workout easy to perform include

Never schedule your workout after you get to home from work. If you get home before working out then you will get comfortable there. This will add to your will power requirements. Not only do you have to drive to your workout place, but you also have to leave the comfort of your home. Skipping your workout will seem very enticing in such a situation. So complete your workout before getting to home. If your office or home does not have a gym, make sure that your gym is along the way from your home to work. You can visit the gym while going to work or coming back home. It should never be too much of the way. It is best to workout first thing in the morning if possible. You are most energized in the morning and you have a fresh dose of will power with you. Getting the most difficult and most important thing done in the morning is the best way to stay on track. Additional push from your friends and family is going to decrease your will power requirements, so try to schedule your workouts with your friends or family. Always perform the workout that you enjoy. If you do not enjoy your workout then stop wasting your time and look for something else that you might enjoy. If you don’t feel wonderful after performing your workout, then it is sign of omen, which will lead you to failure in the long run. Always perform a workout with a goal in mind. A workout with no goal in mind will be unfulfilling and gets boring in a short time. You will never stick to a workout program if you do not have an end goal in mind.

Fitness is a slow process, which takes time and effort. Moreover it is not a destination, but a habit, which is has to be sustained lifelong. Therefore we need to develop the discipline to exercise regularly. Discipline is all about how to best manage your will power. Your will power is limited and very precious. By the techniques we have mentioned in this article you will be spending very little will power in performing your workouts. This way you will be able cultivate the discipline to stick to your workout program in the long run and achieve your fitness goals.