We’ve all been there. You’re sound asleep when the alarm you set for 6:30am starts yelling at you. You had decided to start working out. Today was going to be the day. You had your clothing set out, your meal plan written down and prepped, shoes near the door, and even went to bed a bit earlier so you would be well rested when you set off on your 32nd attempt to try and build yourself into something better.

Lady sleeping deeply at night

All the plans you had to get up and put in a good workout before work suddenly vanish as you realize how warm and comfortable your bed is. Just a few more minutes, you think, so you hit the snooze button. Next thing you know, the alarm is blaring again and you have to walk out the door in 20 minutes for work. There goes the opportunity. After work you have to bring your kids to practice or hit up a night class before heading out with friends for a pre-planned night on the town that you can’t get out of. “I’ll start next week.”

That is your 32nd failure. You might not realize it, but the more often that you tell yourself you are going to do something and don’t, aka you lie to yourself, the easier it becomes to fail over and over and the less likely you are to hit those goals. You don’t know how to be consistent with your goals, which is why you are here.

Goals Don’t Happen Unless You Make Them Happen

Everyone has goals. Maybe you want to live a healthier life, get in shape, trim down/bulk up, or just feel all around better. Maybe you are already in shape, but you have areas you want to improve.

You want to build your body, mind, or spirit the way you want it, but keep failing to actually make any progress. Mentally, you are drained. Energy wise you have none. You hurt. Overall, your wellness is suffering.

It’s not that you don’t want to hit those goals. Its that no matter what you do you just can’t seem to find the motivation, discipline, or time to stick with it. Life doesn’t always give you the best set of circumstances to work with. Timelines, family obligations, health problems for yourself or family/friends. Things always just happen when you can least afford them.

One thing that took me forever to learn was that letting life dictate when you could do things will never work to your benefit. You need to make time for working out, meal prep, spiritually recharging, or working on your overall mentality just like you do if you want to move up in your career.

You need to make time for yourself. After all, you make time friends and family. You can absolutely find some time for yourself to reach those goals.

You can build yourself into exactly what you want. It isn’t easy, and it isn’t always fun, but it is always possible if you know how to do it.

Social Media. Does. Not. Help.

First off, social media is poison. Yes, it has its place but overall it will destroy your productivity if you let it. Social media is a time sink that you will find yourself scrolling endlessly for hours because that is how it built. 2 hours later you realize you need to cook yourself dinner or rush out to wherever you need to be.

Secondly, it will kill your motivation if you are easy discouraged. Scroll through Instagram and what do you see? The entire feed is filled with post after post of insanely fit people; usually showing off their unrealistic daily workouts and meal preps. You wonder where they get all of the motivation, time, and energy. In all honestly, some of them are sponsored. It’s their livelihood and they are paid to post things that catch your eye, but that’s not necessarily true across the board.

Others are faking it. Social media exists to show off what those on it want to show off, and usually that is a perfect looking front but behind most of those perfect looking lives are miserable people putting on a façade of what they want you to see. The poses, angles, and lighting are all lies. There is almost nothing as deceitful as an IG model.

Social media plays a huge role in negatively shaping our expectations of reality these days. While people on there seemingly wake up with perfectly done hair and a flat stomach, most of us have to yank ourselves out of bed and struggle to find time to work out.

Social media can be a great tool for education or keeping up with friends/family, but that is it. Take the 10-15 minutes you need to keep in touch or find what you are looking for and get off of there, or else it will destroy your goals.

My advice: Take the time you are spending on social media, put down your phone, and replace it with consistent time in the gym.

Motivation?

Truth is, everybody has low motivation days where they would rather lay in bed than go to the gym. Where motivation fails, habit becomes a necessity. People don’t get themselves to the gym every day because they’ve discovered some secret motivational key they’re hiding all for themselves. Motivation is great for the first week or so and then it fades. In reality, people get to the gym because the gym is so ingrained in their daily routine that it doesn’t take a huge motivational burst to go there. It’s just another Tuesday.

Stay Focused on Motivations

Instead, find out what drives you to be better.

It could be kids, a career, your friends circle. Maybe you want better longevity or your health is suffering and you want to do better.

Maybe that is you remembering how much better you felt when you were younger and want that back.

Perhaps, you want to be more active so you have energy to play with your grandchildren as you get older, and want to watch grow up a bit longer and in a way that allows you to do things with them you can’t from your couch.

No matter what the reason is, if it motivates you, use it for your advantage. Find a good reason to get yourself to the gym and think about it every time you want to give up.

Ok, But How do *I* do That?

If you want to be successful at anything in life, you have to start with a goal. Figure out what you want to do, create a plan to accomplish that goal, and set out to crush that goal. Repeat. The same can be said about your own health and wellness journey.

You cannot expect to just write down some words on paper and expect it to happen. You need consistency, which is why you are here.

Consistency will bring you to a lot of places.

Consistency

So how do you stay consistent in any part of life?

Start by scheduling your day in a way that points towards your goals.

Make gym time the same time every day of the week. Figure out where you can fit it in, pencil it into your schedule, and then set yourself up for success by planning. Good times to go include when you first wake up or just after work before you get home. Once you get home and change into comfortable clothes, you will be much less likely to have the motivation or desire to head back out, especially if it is *just* to the gym.

If your goal is better nutrition, do the same thing but for meal prep. Take an hour each day to figure out your next days meals, make them, and put them into quick grab containers. This saves time in the long run, keeps you on track nutritionally, and even saves you money.

Same for meditation, career progression, or any other aspect in life. Take an hour each day to work on it.

Set alarms on your phone if you need to.

Studies show that it takes about 21 days for the average person to begin to form a habit. Three weeks really isn’t that long in the grand scheme of things, especially for something like fitness. That three weeks can be hard, especially if you have trouble being consistent. Consider how many people start working out January 1st and quit by the 15th. If you can make it three weeks, chances are you will get pretty far on your journey. The first few weeks are the hardest.

Here are some tips to be more consistent.

Write Out What You Plan on Accomplishing the Next Morning

The first tip for keeping yourself accountable and consistent on your journey to wherever you want to go is to write out what you want to accomplish the next day the night before.

Plan workouts that you genuinely like, at least at first. Part of what makes going to the gym so difficult for some people is that they genuinely don’t enjoy their workout or don’t know what to do. Some even dread going to the gym because they hate going through the motions. Build out a plan full of things you think you will like. When you get there, you can just jump into them. Standing around trying to figure out what you want to do will kill your motivation, and consistency will suffer.

If you can’t stand running on the treadmill for thirty minutes, don’t run on the treadmill for thirty minutes! Play around with weights, plan for a few HIIT workouts a week, or even sample some of the fitness classes your gym offers.

List of things to do

Looking for career progression? Write down that you will read a chapter of an educational book about higher levels in your career field each day, or that you will attend a webinar.

Meditation and mindfulness can have a stated goal of taking 20 minutes the next day to just sit in silence.

Find what you genuinely enjoy, work it into your plan, write it down, and start there. Get into a rhythm. It will help.

If your day is planned full of things you look forward to, you’re going to be more likely to show up, work harder, and reach those goals.

Set Clear, Achievable Goals

Define your goals with precision, making sure they are measurable and attainable.

Write down goals down whether they are related to weight loss, how many pull-ups you can do, how much weight you can lift, or whatever else you want to do.

  • Have a goal weight? Write it down
  • Want a specific body fat percentage? Write it down
  • See someone’s bench record and want to break it? Write it down
  • Do you want to run sub-7 minute miles? Write it down

Break them down into smaller, manageable tasks that can be accomplished step by step. More on that in a minute.

Then, each day record your progress towards those goals. Every few weeks check your progress. Seeing your end goals get closer is a fantastic way to keep yourself motivated while you work on yourself.

Make a List

Lots of people feel there are few things in life more satisfying than checking off a to-do list. While not the exact same as writing down your daily goals, it is similar but seeing the progress you are making on paper could help.

Creating a power list (to steal that concept from Andy Frisella) of 5 critical tasks you want to accomplish each day that will help you reach your goals and forcing yourself to do them before you go to bed can be extremely helpful towards making progress. It is monotonous, but the small details get you over the line, not the lofty goals.

What those tasks look like is 100% dependent on what your goal is.

Habits

Regardless of if you are working with positive or negative habits, they will dramatically influence how consistent you are with whatever activity they are associated with.

Someone who has a habit of smoking will rarely miss taking a cigarette break unless there is some sort of outside pressure to miss it. Maybe they ran out of cigarettes, or their job duties forced them to miss a break. In either case, they will take a break at their very next opportunity and go smoke.

Same goes for people trying to build positive habits. Focusing on positive habits will eventually put you in a better place. Doing the same activities at the same time each day forces them to become second nature.

In the grand scheme of working on consistency, one thing that helped me to build better habits is something I read in Atomic Habits called habit stacking. Basically, you take something you are already doing as a habit and add a second thing to it so that the additional action also becomes a habit. One example being showering and brushing your teeth. Most people will do one and then the other as a consistent, habitual routine.

If you are trying to improve consistency with a specific area of life, find something you are already doing regularly and add in a secondary activity to stack alongside it. For some folks maybe that is adding in 30 minutes of professional reading when they eat their lunch. Others might benefit from cooking an extra portion of whatever they are making if their goal is to pre-plan their next days meals.

Small, easy to add in tasks can lay the foundation for bigger habit changes down the road. You don’t need to change everything all at once.

Accountability

This is a big one. Accountability. No one likes that word because it is intrusive, but it works. Most people would rather let themselves down than let someone else down, which is really not a better mindset in the grand scheme of things. Regardless, you can use that basic human behavior to help you reach your own goals.

The idea of struggling in silence is often the idea of setting yourself up for failure. Many of us are not capable of holding ourselves accountability, at least at first. Think about sharing your progress with someone else or using an app to keep you accountable.

Sharing your journey with others will give you an extra set of eyes that will push you along and make sure you are staying consistent with whatever you are trying to do.

Mentors, coaches, even your spouse can work as an accountability partner. If you struggle putting in the effort consistently, try putting yourself into a place where others can help you get there. It doesn’t need to be a struggle. In fact, seeing people struggle in silence at home during the lockdowns of 2020 and consistently fail is why I started CONDITIONerd. If you need help, reach out.

Stay Adaptable:

Finally, be prepared to adjust your methods and goals as needed. When faced with setbacks and obstacles towards being more consistent, assess and pivot rather than giving up. This will never be a linear journey towards any of your goals, and consistency will grow and fall off during that period

Build a plan. Create a program.

Once you know what you like doing and what you absolutely cannot stand, compare them to your goals. I am confident that you can align exercises you like with where you want to go. Make it a well rounded program, incorporating a bit of cardio, maybe some HIIT, and a bit of strength training. Perhaps hit up some yoga or isometrics once in a while. Throw in some supplements if you need them. Bring it all together in a master plan with small milestones on your way there. After all, you wouldn’t drive across country without stopping.

Instead, first you plan a route, plot out how far you are going to go each day, decide where you are going to stop each night, and after a few days you reach your destination. Same idea for fitness.

Don’t forget to incorporate proper hydration, diet, and stretching into whatever program you build out. All of these individual portions of your plan work in tandem to help you get (relatively) quick results. They will reinforce each other as you build habits towards a healthier you.

Good habits are key

At the end of the day, motivation is always going to fall second to habit. Remember why you set your goals in the first place. Your future you is going to thank you for making the change. All those morning of waking up when it was hard will pay off. A couple small decisions, a couple of small changes can change your life and help you build you the want you want to be.

Get started on your own training program, today.

Let Us Help You Out

I want to help you achieve better physical and mental health through exercise. Check out the plans I offer to my clients and see if you could benefit from working with me. If you have questions, you can always contact me through the Contact Us page

Health coaches, like myself, can help guide you on your pathway towards reaching your overall health and wellness goals, whether that is getting bigger, stronger, faster, more lean, or just generally feeling better physically or mentally.

If you choose to join one of my programs we will work together to help you uncover motivations and roadblocks, improve your overall health and wellness, and get you on a path to being excellent in all that you do through higher levels of overall fitness

The only thing you need is some motivation and a willingness to change some old habits.

Get into contact with me to find out what, if any, membership is right for you.

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