Do you find that sometimes you set yourself the challenge to start exercising regularly? You set yourself a lofty goal of working out XX number of times a week or running XX number of miles in a month. Whilst these goals sound wonderful initially, they become very hard to maintain longer term and the initial motivation that you had can wear off, leading you to stop exercising.
Rather than focusing on big lofty fitness goals, why not try to focus on how you can build habits. Habits that over time become natural to you. By creating healthy and sustainable habits you are far more likely to turn exercising into a permanent life change, which can in turn boost your longer-term mental health, improve your sleep, reduce anxiety and many other benefits of exercising regularly.
So, here are 5 tips on how to build healthier habits:
- Start small – This may sound simple, but it is extremely effective. Rather than setting larger, longer-term goals, break down your goals into small bitesize ones that you can achieve. By regularly achieving goals, it increases motivation and your chances of continuing. Rather than just signing up for a half marathon, start with a 1k run, then build up each run 1k at a time
- Habit stacking – This is one of our favourite. If you have another habit in your daily routine, try exercising straight after that habit. A simple example is waking up. Every day you wake up from sleep. If you start exercising straight after waking up, your mind will start associating waking up with exercising, which will remove making the decision to exercise as it will just become automatic
- Accountability – Tell someone close to you about your plans to exercise. By sharing with someone it allows two things to happen. Firstly, they will hold you accountable for hitting your goals. Secondly, it will act as motivation for you as you won't want to tell them you didn’t achieve your fitness goal
- Reward yourself – Again, this may sound obvious, but if you build positive, healthy ways to reward yourself for achieving your fitness goals, you are more likely to keep them up
- Patience – I know, patience isn't a glamorous word. We all want results today! However, it has been proven that it takes 45 days to cement a habit. So be patient and keep up the positive habits you have created!
We hope that these tips can help you build a sustainable exercise and fitness routine, which in turn will boost your mental health!
Much love,
Simon and Dannii