I joined Fitbit just over a year ago. My goal was to lose some weight, become more athletic, eat better and build up endurance and strength.
Unfortunately, as many of you will know well from experience, although buying a Fitbit is a good tool that can be used to track progress, a lot of work and dedication is required to reach your goals!
The key to getting up and working towards your goals is having motivation. Some people get motivation from listening to certain songs, others by following influencer fitness pages and so on. If you're reading this, you are probably looking for other ways to become motivated.
Working towards goals like mine, you need a constant motivated and goal-getting state of mind. Otherwise, you will only make some progress when in this state, and when you leave it, you'll eventually degrade back to step one.
Below I am going to list some of the things which helped me to achieve this mindset. I believe they may be useful to you too, in becoming motivated and helping you in achieving your goals.
First what you should do is identify your goals. Are you looking for weight loss? Weight gain? Strength enhancement? You need to know what you are striving for if you are going to achieve it.
Motivation is achieved through belief and perseverance. You need to believe that your goal is attainable. You will not be motivated to work towards something you find physically impossible. Sometimes things can seem impossible because you don't know how you're going to get there. So the first step to becoming more motivated is to break down the path to your goal.
Let me put it in an easy to understand manner. Imagine this is your situation:
YOUR GOAL > To be able to run 5 miles.
But as of right now you can only run 0.5 miles. Every day you get up, go outside, tell your Fitbit you're starting an exercise and set the goal for 5 miles. But every day you can only do the 0.5 miles. You end the exercise sequence on your watch and see you did not come close to reaching your goal.
Every day this will be disheartening. You'll start to feel like you're failing and that you will never reach your goal. Your perseverance will slowly fall until you give up altogether. This isn't what we want.
So instead of setting the goal to 5 miles, set it to 1. This way, you are pushing and challenging yourself and making progress. Small steps lead to big results.
You should set out these goals in a clear way. Maybe through an exercise diary where you can give yourself a star when you make it to 1 mile, then another at 2 miles, etc.
The next thing you can do to be more motivated is to surround yourself with people who are trying to reach the same goals as you. The Fitbit community is good for this, but other socials can have good communities, too. You can set competitions and group goals, let your fitness friends motivate you and help you hold yourself accountable
Give yourself a break! If you are doing high-intensity workouts every day and eating restricting yourself to foods that fit inside your calorie intake levels, that might work for you. But it can also be tiring for many people. If you burn yourself out and ignore what your body is telling you, you will no doubt crash. Crashing is the opposite of what we want to be doing. You should be going on an upward journey towards your goals, a cheat day here and there is;t going to kill you. Just try and make sure the cheat days don't overtake the good days.,
Make your responsibilities a game. So many people think that workouts have to be boring work. You can be having fun with it.
Reward yourself. You're less likely to skip out on this week's final workout if you know you can gift yourself that nice new thing you wanted afterwards. Come on, you earned it.
Break it down. Exercising can be intimidating because it seems like a really big commitment. But here are some ways to break it down so it seems less challenging:
- Ten seconds at a time. It's not five minutes of squats if you don't want it to be, just ten seconds of squats, then another ten, then another ten.
- Switch it around. Need to do 50 arm circles? Instead of counting up to 50, count down from 50. It makes the workout seem like it's not lasting so long. Trust me, it works.
- Change your mindset. You don't need to get out of bed to do 30 minutes of exercise. You just need to get out of bed to do your pushups. Then after your pushups, you just need to do your pull-ups, etc. One at a time. Break it down.
It only takes a little bit of motivation to get the machine working, once you've started the rest of the motivation will come flooding in. You just need to do that first push-up.
Remind yourself why you are doing this. A good idea is when you are in a motivated mood make something to remind you later WHY you are working towards your goal. Write it down in a journal, have your phone send you a reminder every morning, make a vision board, write a motivational speech to recite to yourself every morning when you're brushing your teeth, write a platinum-selling song they play on the radio every morning as you're driving to work.
Don't just count on your brain to remind you why every time you need motivation. Your brain sucks, it's a liar.
The main thing to maximise motivation is to not let setbacks ruin your mojo. Fitbits are expensive, you didn't spend all that money to lose your motivation now. Get up, get motivated and get to reaching those goals.
Doing these things have helped me well in moving towards my goals. I hope they might help you as well.
Feel free to add anything that has helped you stay motivated in your goals in the replies.
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