Establishing a workout routine and sticking to is a tough task. You need to persevere in your efforts for sculpted body months and years on end. Staying motivated in the gym is hard enough, let alone working on your own. In a gym, you have a coach and other people to help you and cheer you on, while back at home the strength of your will power is the main motivator. Well, in most cases it is, as there are other methods to help you stick to your home workout routine.
Rituals and routines
In terms of your body, one of the most important things is to get it into a routine. This way, you will be physically fit to train even though your brain is telling your muscles to relax because they are at home. In order to get into the exercising routine, you can use a ritual to signal to your body that it is time for exercise. Food can be the ideal trigger for this, so a banana or a chocolate milkshake before practice are ideal foods to get you started. After a couple of weeks, the body will get into the routine, so there will no longer be mixed signal to relax and to train at the same time.
A gym or home?
Since you are working out from the comfort of your home, a logical question looms; hoe can you persuade yourself to train if you associate the home with relaxing? In order to fool yourself to get into training mode, you have to redecorate the space you work out in. If this is the bedroom, as in most cases it is, then add a mat of a different color than the hardwood floor or the rug. Furthermore, you can play some music and open the blinds to let the natural light in. These small interventions will create an environment ideal for exercising, fooling your brain into thinking it is in a proper gym.
Working out the entire body
According to many people, working out at home has a very big downside. Besides staying motivated, people who exercise cannot activate all muscle groups. Well, this is actually not true, because you can use the sheer shape and weight of your body to work every single muscle. For some exercises, you’ll need a chair or a bottle of water as a “homemade” replacement for machines and dumbbell but other than that, a home gym does not lag far behind a commercial one. It is remarkable what you can dig up online these days, as websites such as Garage Gym even offer mobility exercises for the shoulder area. Any seasoned bodybuilder can tell you how hard it is to work on your shoulder outside a conventional gym, but even these exercises can be performed at home.
Dress for the occasion
We all love casual Fridays at our firm but wearing short or slipper can hardly get us into the right work atmosphere. That is why dressing for the occasion is an excellent way to boost your self-confidence. “You are what you wear” is a saying suitable for this occasion because the right apparel will influence our minds to enter the “workout” mode. Trust us, after you don the workout clothes, you will not want to take them off and you’ll start wearing them around the house all the time. In is sense, this is a good thing, because you will be always ready to start sweating.
It’s your thing
Like you don’t go down the street telling everyone that you’re an atheist, Christian, Muslim, etc., you shouldn’t blab about exercising. It is vital to keep all the exercising routines to yourself because spreading the (good) new will put extra pressure on you. The last thing you need is people constantly asking you how’s the working out progressing! Keep your effort to lose weight or build muscle mass to yourself, at least in the beginning. Ideally, the results of all the hard work will speak louder than words.
Set goal(s)
We must say that drawing out a home exercise routine and sticking to it is plain hard. There are countless wannabe bodybuilders who gave up after a single week or a month so you need an extra boost to keep you going. Just as you learned hard to get an A in school so your parents would buy you that perfect toy, you should self-motivate yourself in the same way. Set short-term and long-term that will help you stay on track. Each milestone would have an appropriate award attached to it. For instance, if you lose 10 kilos, then you can book a lovely holiday on a Greek island with your loved-ones.
Levels of motivation may be high when you are beginning but as you progress and weeks go by, you will probably less often roll out the exercise mat. This why implementing one of the 6 methods listed here will help you stay motivated. A simple “you can do it” is not merely enough, as there’s meticulousness in staying focused and motivated in working out at home.