Do What You Love
Other methods of preventing burnout while keeping your motivation levels high include choosing an activity that you can actually look forward to doing every day. “You may hear that a spin class plus circuit training is fantastic for fitness, but if you dread both of those activities, it’s doubtful you’ll stick with them for long,” says Aaron Snyder, a certified trainer and nutritional consultant in San Diego. “The less willpower it takes to workout, the better.”
Snyder found his own way back to a healthy workout routine by finding an activity that exhilarated him. “After living a year abroad, I had completely gotten out of my usual rigorous workout schedule,” says Snyder. “So I began doing wind sprints on the beach three or four times per week. This felt more like fun to me than work [and] I began to lose some of the extra fat I had accumulated during my hiatus.”
Set new goals
Reducing extra pounds may be the primary reason why you decided to start exercising again, but broadening your view of success can keep you on the road to fitness. Dr. Susan Bartell, a Port Washington, New York-based psychologist and health expert, recommends setting small, short-term goals that are readily achievable. This method allows you to feel accomplished immediately. Short-term goals can include simply extending the length of your workout by a minute or two each day or walking on the treadmill at a higher resistance level for a few minutes.
After you begin to feel more comfortable with your new fitness routine you can begin to set long-term goals. “Long-term goals should include adding new workouts to your routine (take a class once a week instead of only using the treadmill), challenging yourself (running in a 5K race) and never staying stagnant when it comes to…the challenge of your workouts,” says Bartell. “Give yourself a goal of how long or how often or how hard you want to exercise each month and make a new goal once you’ve achieved the one you set (as long as this is medically healthy for you, of course). This will help you stay motivated.”
Concluded
