Yeah yeah, I know. Exercise is hard and you’re still a bit sore from last time and it’s cold today and “insert other excuses here”.

Well, you can forget about excuses with the super wicked awesome cool “life hack” I’m about to share with you.

Are you ready? Here it is – avoid making decisions. Sounds counterintuitive, doesn’t it?

So how does it work?

By not making a decision every day about whether you are going to train, your brain relies on habit and routine to get through the day. If you know that every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday you go to the gym, then that is what you are going to do.

The moment you have to decide whether you want to go to the gym, you’re fighting a losing battle. Let’s be honest, for most of us, all we want to do after a day at work is go home and vegetate on the couch – asking your brain to choose to do the hard thing at this point is just unfair.

By making it a habit, no decisions are required. Your brain is happy because it doesn’t need to think, which means there is no internal war to contend with.

We used to believe that willpower and self-control were neverending resources and that people who didn’t get things done were just lazy. More recent research suggests that willpower is a finite resource and that we use it up much more quickly than we think.

Every time we choose salad over a burger or choose to go to the gym instead of chilling out on the couch we are using up our willpower. By replacing this willpower dependent choice with a habit, we free ourselves from relying on our willpower.

Since I took the decision-making process out of my day, I’ve been able to consistently train 4 days a week with a couple of mobility sessions thrown in on top and I haven’t had to force myself to go, it just happens.

The key to success with this approach is to build habits off triggers which occur in your day. For me, there are two triggers which help get me to the gym:

When I’m getting dressed for work each morning – this is the trigger to pack whatever I need for training that evening; and Finishing work – this is the trigger for me to get in my car and drive to the gym. Once I’m there I figure I may as well train – it’s very hard to skip out once someone has seen you.

Depending on whether I have Crossfit or BJJ that evening, I know what type of gear I need to pack – the only decision is which leggings or gi to pack and even this is usually decided for me by reducing my choices to whatever is clean.

There is one last thing which helps us cement habits. Reward!

The reward component of our habits changes dependent on the habit we are building – for me with my training, the reward is the endorphin hit I get for exercising, whereas someone who is trying to build a habit of cooking at home may find that the reward is a healthy home-cooked meal.

The rewards which are attached to our habits aren’t a promise that if you go to the gym 12 times this month you can buy those cool leggings you’ve been eyeing off. They need to be more immediate than that. The cool leggings may be your motivation for building the habit, but they aren’t the reward. Your reward may be an endorphin hit like me, it may be spending time with your favourite training partner or the satisfaction of sore muscles after a good workout. It doesn’t matter what the trigger and reward are so long as they work for you.

To summarise, habits > willpower. Build your habits off a trigger and work out what your reward is.

It takes time to build habits so don’t go out and try and build in 20 new habits straight away. Pick the thing you want to incorporate into your life the most and focus on that. Once you feel uncomfortable not doing it when the trigger occurs (for example, not brushing my teeth as soon as you get out of bed just feels wrong), then you can pick the next habit to build in.

Try and avoid using the same trigger for multiple habits – it brings your brain back in to make decisions about priorities and we all know how that ends.

Habits are exclusively for getting us to the gym either. It may be self-care (I give myself a pedicure every Sunday evening) or it may be something you do for someone else.