So, you’ve decided enough is enough. You want to learn how to love fitness. Maybe you’re determined to lose weight, or you want to enhance muscle tone. Your doctor might have strongly advised you to exercise for your health, or perhaps you want to show your ex what they’re missing. Whatever the motivation, you’ve decided that working out is the answer, and this time you’re determined to succeed.
Unfortunately, you’ve probably heard that most people who set out on a fitness journey fail. They start bright-eyed, but after a few months, they burn out and return to sitting on the couch after a long day instead of hitting the gym.
Only 23 percent of people exercise enough to meet the CDC’s minimum leisure activity requirements. If you want to be one of the few who do, you need to change your mindset toward fitness.
Mindset Hacks
The truth is that you have a lot more control over your health than it may appear. These five steps will help you to change how you think about working out so you can learn to love fitness.
1. Take Responsibility
2. Figure Out Your Limiting Beliefs
Examples of limiting beliefs in regards to fitness might sound like: “I don’t have a runners body, so I can’t run,” “I’m not athletic because I didn’t do sports in high school,” or “My family has a history of obesity and, therefore, I will eventually become obese.”
Only you know the beliefs that are holding you back from loving fitness. Examine your relationship to fitness closely- both past and present.
What’s your family’s relationship to fitness?
How do you see yourself when you are working out?
What types of activities do you avoid because you think you should?
Try journaling about your limiting beliefs and see how many you can identify. Once you know your limits, you can work towards pushing past them.
3. Find The Lesson
Regarding fitness, the lesson might be related to how you spend your time or think about working out.
Are you letting other people tell you how you should spend your time?
Did you ignore signals from your body that told you to stop pushing too hard?
Were you listening to your instincts or following the path of your limiting beliefs?
Internalize the lesson and move forward. Don’t give yourself too much grief for making mistakes. It happens to everyone. Simply find the lesson and try to make new mistakes in the future.
4. Set your goals
Setting a clear goal is crucial to success. You can’t learn to love fitness if your goal is to “maybe make it to the gym once this month” or to “stop sitting on the couch after work.”
When setting your goals, be clear and pragmatic. And don’t forget, once you’ve met your easy goals (and you will!), set harder ones to keep challenging yourself.
5. Get support
In an ideal world, you would change your relationship with fitness all by yourself. However, the reality is that most people don’t know what to do with a set of dumbbells or how long they should stay on a treadmill to get maximum results.
With the advent of apps, learning about fitness became easy. Want to start doing yoga? There’s an app for that. Yearning to bulk up and start lifting weights? There’s an app for that too.
Or, if you prefer real-life support, you can find personal trainers and fitness instructors ready to help in most gyms. But support doesn’t just mean in the fitness world. You also need to build a strong support system outside of the gym.
It seems harsh, but you may need to start eliminating the people who fuel your bad habits. Those friends who talk you out of the gym to go drinking or the family member constantly reminding you that you’re overweight. While you’re changing your mindset, you’re particularly vulnerable to these people, and it will be easier to give them some space while you set your path to success.
Surround yourself with people who believe you can succeed and give back support! You don’t have to do it all alone.
Lasting Changes
Dealing with chronic pain can make it hard to stay motivated about changing your mindset, but the Kailo Pain Patch can help. You can apply it anywhere, any time, and wear it all day (even while you exercise or shower). It’s designed to relieve pain in seconds, and a recent clinical study showed that 99% of patients felt pain relief with Kailo within 10 minutes of using the pain patch.
Disclaimer: Kailo should not be used if you have a pacemaker or if you are pregnant. Always consult your doctor or health care professional before using Kailo.
