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How To Create A Lifestyle From Fitness That Lasts | Make Working Out A Habit

  • Jan 12, 2021
  • 4 min read

In the last blog I wrote about how to start your fitness journey and this one is the continuation of that. When I started my journey, the first week of working out was amazing & easy. I couldn't wait for the next day to exercise again. After that week my motivation & excitement gradually started to drop. I didn't want to stop working out so I had to find a way to create a lifestyle from it and make exercising a habit. I'll be sharing with you some tips & tricks you can use to achieve this but first let's look at the science behind creating habits.


What Is A Habit?


A habit is a routine of behavior that is repeated regularly and tends to occur subconsciously.

The American Journal of Psychology (1903) defines a "habit, from the standpoint of psychology, a more or less fixed way of thinking, willing, or feeling acquired through previous repetition of a mental experience." Habitual behavior often goes unnoticed in persons exhibiting it, because a person does not need to engage in self-analysis when undertaking routine tasks. New behaviours can become automatic through the process of habit formation. Old habits are hard to break and new habits are hard to form because the behavioural patterns which humans repeat become imprinted in neural pathways, but it is possible to form new habits through repetition.[1]


How Habits Form?


Habits are built through learning and repetition. A person is thought to develop a habit in the course of pursuing goals by beginning to associate certain cues with behavioral responses that help meet the goal . Over time, thoughts of the behavior and ultimately the behavior itself are likely to be triggered by these cues.[2]


How Long Does It Take To Build A Habit?


Turning to popular internet lore, the most commonly quoted number is that it takes 21 days to form a habit. This belief apparently originates from Psycho-Cybernetics, a book published in the 1960s by plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz. Maltz noticed that his plastic surgery patients took 21 days, on average, to get used to seeing their new faces in the mirror. He extrapolated that it takes at least 21 days for something to become second nature to us humans. Although Maltz was careful not to claim his observations as facts, society quickly adopted the 21-days myth.


Dr Phillippa Lally and her collaborators conducted a more rigorous study in 2009. Researchers recruited 96 people who were interested in forming a new, daily habit like, say, drinking a glass of water before bed, and monitored them over 12 weeks. Each day participants were asked to self-report on how “automatic” their new, self-chosen habit felt, including whether it felt “hard not to do” or if they could do it “without thinking.”

The results were … let’s say highly varied. For some participants, they only needed 18 days for a behavior to become a habit. For others, their adopted behaviors still didn’t feel like second nature after 254 days, although the researchers predicted the hold-outs would get there eventually.


So, on average, it took participants 66 days to solidify their new habit. [3]




Overall creating a habit of fitness requires effort & presistance in the first 1-3 months so let's look at some tips you can do to help this process.


1. Set The Time


You can do this in the evening on the day before you want to exercise or in the morning the same day. First decide approx. how long you want your workout to be (10-30 minutes is a great start) & then consciously commit a time in the day and try make sure that nothing else takes away your attention so you can fully immerse in it. If something doesn't go as planned adapt a flexible mindset by acceptance & try again the next day.


2. Wait With Progressing


For the first couple of weeks keep the same intensity. Get your body used to whatever you've started with and when you feel like you're comfortable enough with that workout, slowly make it a bit more intense. If you try to progress fast in the first weeks & months, you're much more likely to burn out & stop exercising alltogether. Your body needs time to adjust & if you don't want to fall into the trap of starting but stopping after a week or two than definitely be aware of this.


3. Make It Fun & Enjoyable


You're much more likely to stick with exercising if you don't think about it in a way of: "oh no I have to workout again". Even if it's not your favorite thing yet, you can still make it more fun.

Play music you like, get a workout buddy, try something new, join a class, exercise outdoors or reward yourself after finishing the workout.


4. Don't Go "All or Nothing"


If you want to keep fitness in your life, the "all or nothing" attitude won't help you for sure. I'm talking about when you are only doing workouts when you can give your 100% percent and if you can't for some reason, you stop completely. Nobody ever gives their 100% percent all the time. There will be days when you'll be unstoppable and there will be ones when you can't even do half of what you could on the day before. This is completely normal. Still if you just show up and do an easy workout or just stretch, your body will thank you for it later.



So for now that's about it for habits. I hope it helps to understand the process of creating a lifestyle from fitness & making working out a habit. Try these 4 tips above & you'll make this process a bit easier.




Stay Happy & Healthy,


Sofi






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