Do you struggle with motivation?
Even the most successful people struggle with the same issues that you face.
The difference? Successful people know how to get themselves into optimal performance mode – no matter what mood or feeling might be affecting them personally at that moment!
On a long enough timeline even the most motivated person will not be motivated at some point. They hit a wall and want to do nothing, watch Netflix and eat junk food just like any other person.
What keeps them going regardless of their level of motivation? How do they choose to eat healthy food and go to the gym even when the in the kitchen cookies are calling their name?
7 strategies you can use.
- Get a coach. Being held accountable by a detached third party. Let’s be honest, you don’t want your spouse or partner to hold you accountable. The people you work with care more about their own success than yours. Your friends want you to be just like them.
You need someone to:
- Remove the guesswork
- Get you results FAST (you’ll see why in the next step)
- Hold you accountable. You can “ghost” someone over text, but you can’t miss appointments.
- Provide a “pain” for failure. That means you have to pay for coaching. If you don’t, there’s no real penalty for failure… and you’ll backslide.
- At Red Wolf CrossFit we assign you a coach to guide you through each step.
- Get results quickly. Our instincts are wired to reward quick results and novelty. If we don’t get what we want quickly, motivation decreases.
It keeps us motivated to hear someone say, “You did really well at X”. Apps like Strava and Garmin Connect are great at giving you bright spots when you accomplish a benchmark for the first time. A great coach will highlight your improvements and tell you where else you can improve.
- Set up a “challenge” with a short deadline for yourself … also have a game plan for after the challenge ends.
A six-week sprint is outstanding for short term motivation. Most people fall off the bandwagon when the challenge is over, and many actually backtrack to where they were before the challenge. From what I’ve seen, people who do trendy diets (like intermittent fasting or keto diets) usually gain back the bodyfat they lost and sometimes more. Unfortunately many of these diet plans are unsustainable and incur long-term damage to your metabolism and you wind up either where you started or even worse.
It’s not wrong to do these kinds of diets. We even run challenges and diets at Red Wolf CrossFit. You can even get liposuction if that’s what it takes. Do your best to have the second step ready to go before you take the plunge into the first step.
A professional coach can help you create a game plan and help you stick to it.
- Make it into a habit. If you stick with the plan, going to the gym will get easier. Prepping your meals and grocery shopping will get easier too. It will only work if you get to the point where it becomes a habit. It takes 90 days for our behaviors to become habits and then a few more months for our habits to become “the way we do things.”
- Track everything. Track the results of your workouts. Note what is going well. Track the food you eat and what you drink. Track how you are sleeping. It may seem like a lot of work at first but a coach can give you strategies for every step.
- Use your tools to plan. Try this: Instead of entering your food intake in MyFitnessPal at each meal, enter all of your meals in MyFitnessPal at the beginning of the day. Then add or subtract carbs, fats and protein to hit your macros, and there you have it! – you have a food plan for the next day!
Trust me: It’s far better than wolfing down dry Cheerios into your mouth at 10 p.m. because you’re not hitting your carb intake… At least that’s what my wife tells me.
- Check your progress. Let’s face it, you’re not going to hit a personal record on every workout. That’s okay… The one thing that truly matters is consistency. If you can show up every day, even if you put in 50% of your best effort, you will get better results than those who are perfect one day a week. At Red Wolf CrossFit we use the SugarWOD app to track workouts and the MyCoach app to track nutrition for our members.
Any person who tends to “go out hot will get amazing results temporarily, and then they will get burned out. The people who are consistent track their food and never miss a training session. They get stronger, leaner, and keep it.
What separates the successful people from the rest of the pack is their ability to push through the days where they feel the LEAST motivated but they choose to put in the work anyways.
Consistent, imperfect action always wins.
Let’s get after it.
-Matt
Inspiration provided by Chris Cooper at Catalystgym.com.