Staying Motivated for Fitness
How to Meet and Defeat the Half-Way Doldrums
You’ve made a good start on your fitness or training programme. You’ve established new routines, beaten off a few discomforts, and you’re starting to see some progress.
Now this morning, for no reason, you find you don’t want to get out of bed. You’ll train at lunchtime, you tell yourself. Yeah, right. Somehow you know that by noon, “something will come up.”
What’s going on, and how can you regain your motivation?
Everyone, from reformed “couch-aholics” to multiple marathoners, can be a victim of the halfway doldrums. And everyone—provided you started your exercise or training programme with commitment, and for the right reasons—can get past a bad patch.
Flat Attack
Probably (perhaps at the New Year, maybe long before) you set yourself some goals for exercise. These goals were—to run a mile or a marathon, to swim across a particular lake, to row a million metres, to lose ten kilograms, or to have more energy for daily life. The main thing is that you defined goals in terms of your own aspirations, not what the outside world expects of you.
But now it seems that however far you’ve come towards your objectives is insignificant compared to how far you still have to go. These are the “halfway doldrums”.
Everyone who has made exercise or training a part of their life has been there. But the less experienced you are at fitness activities, the more likely that you will hit a flat patch after only a few weeks, once the initial enthusiasm has worn off. Veteran fitness writer Phil Campbell refers to this as the “storm” period, when you realise that training can be hard work.
Strategies to Get Back on Top
Here are some ways to beat the doldrums, and get the wind back in your sails.
- Review your progress. To put it bluntly, you will have put up with a lot of—nonsense?—to get this far. You will have changed your routines and perhaps enlisted the support of your friends and family. You may have invested in new gear or a gym membership. You will have chlorine-smelling skin, blisters on your feet, calluses on your hands. To a large extent the hard part is done! And you will be a bit stronger, or faster, or lighter than you were. Now is the time to go back to those reasons that got you started exercising and to celebrate having made a good beginning.
- Have another look at your diet. Maybe it’s not fair, but the more you exercise the healthier your diet needs to be. You may well be burning the calories from the beer or ice cream, but it won’t do you any good in the long run if the comfort food is replacing good quality carbohydrate or protein. Drinking enough water and the timing of when you eat can also make a big difference to finding the motivation to train well. Nancy Clark’s Sports Nutrition Guidebook (Human Kinetics Publishers, 2003) is one example of a ”fit-food” resource that may be available in your local library.
- Consider “extrinsic motivations”. OK, it’s better to do things for yourself than for other reasons, such as, for example, to please an image-conscious employer. But there is a place for outside or “extrinsic” motivations, and getting you through the doldrums might be it. If you have a goal endurance event, consider entering it ahead of time. If you don’t invest in the training you will either lose your financial investment or set yourself up for a miserable day. Also, consider small self-bribes. Grant yourself a reward when you have completed say, half your goal mileage. It’s a private way of acknowledging your commitment.
The good news is that it does get easier. If you can get through the initial flat period, exercise becomes a lot more like brushing your teeth—something you don’t really question. Or at least, not very often.
