How to Motivate Yourself When You Are Discouraged With Working Out

Working out is an ideal way to get fit.

Working out can help drastically change your body, which in turn can have a positive effect on such things as your sense of self-esteem. Changing your body takes time, however, and it is easy to lose your motivation for working out when it's difficult to discern if your efforts are amounting to much. You may look in the mirror and not see a change after weeks of hard work. By employing a few motivational practices, however, you can improve your motivation and avoid getting discouraged in working out.

Instructions

1. Set workout goals. Research from Ming Chuan University demonstrates that developing a mindset of mastery, in which you try to improve your abilities on a given task, helps to fuel motivation. Establishing a goal of bench-pressing your own body weight, for example, or running for a specific amount of time, like an hour, at a certain pace, such as eight miles per hour, can help motivate you.

2. Using pen and paper, record any goals that you decide upon, and more importantly, record your progress. With the bench press example in Step 1, for instance, you could record your total weight bench-pressed, the number of sets and the number of reps. Then, record this same information for each successive visit to the gym.

3. Take a picture of yourself with little or no clothing on, so that you have an image to which you can compare later. Research from the University of Rochester shows that body concerns are often a major motivation for those who work out. Then, every month take another photo, and compare it to the previous photo, so that you have an objective, visual measurement of the progress you are making in transforming your body.

4. Consider changing your gym if nothing else seems to work. Research from the United States Sports Academy suggests that variables such as service quality and customer satisfaction at a given fitness club can affect the motivation of the fitness club customers. In part, this is because if you are dissatisfied with your gym, whether it's the equipment, the trainers or the facilities in general, you are less likely to want to go to that gym.

References

• Ammons Scientific: Psychological Reports; Predictions of Intrinsic Motivation and Sports Performance Using 2x3 Achievement Goal Framework; Chiung-Huang Li et al.
• University of Rochester Psychology Department: Differences in Motivation for Sport and Exercise and Their Relations with Participation and Mental Health
• Essential Readings in Sport and Exercise Psychology: Daniel Smith and Michael Bar-Eli
• United States Sports Academy: The Study of Exercise Participation Motivation and the Relationship Among Service Quality, Customer Satisfaction, and Customer Loyalty at Selected Fitness Health Clubs in Taipei City, Taiwan; Hung-Yung Lin, Ed.D