Here’s How to Start an Exercise Routine You Can Actually Stick With

It’s one of those notorious phenomena in the world of health and fitness, that every January, hordes of people will sign up for gym memberships in order to carry out their New Year’s fitness resolutions, only to have almost completely disappeared by March at the latest.

We all know that exercise is good for us, and many of us sincerely want to get into regular and healthy fitness routines.

It’s just that something always goes wrong, motivation disappears, life gets in the way, and before we know it, we’re back on the sofa.

Luckily, it is actually possible for you to start an exercise routine and stick with it. It’s just about approaching it in the right way.

Here are some tips.

Do exercises you enjoy, rather than ones you hate

Exercise should be tiring, but it doesn’t have to be punishment. If you absolutely hate running on a treadmill, then trying to force yourself to do it for an hour every day is obviously likely to drive you half mad, and to make you resent your workout sessions altogether.

But who said you have to do exercise that you hate, anyway?

If you hate running on a treadmill, you should realize that it’s also possible to get the ultimate workout with a rowing machine. Or while playing tennis. Or while cycling. Or while practicing martial arts.

There are a huge number of ways to get fit – both in terms of cardiovascular conditioning and in terms of strength building. “Shop around” a bit, experiment with different workouts, and do the stuff you actually enjoy. If your visits to the gym don’t feel like medieval punishment, you’re more likely to actually stick with them.

Start developing the exercise habit in a ridiculously easy and small-scale way

Several authors have written great books about successfully establishing new habits, in the last few years. Among these are Charles Duhigg with “The Power of Habit,” and James Clear with “Atomic Habits.”

One theme that comes up again and again in the suggestions of habit gurus, is that you need to view the act of creating your habit as a matter of routine, rather than a matter of hard work, at the outset.

When you begin a fitness routine, you shouldn’t necessarily be trying to get good workouts in. You should just be getting yourself used to turn up at the same time every day, and doing “something” fitness-related.

Not only can this routine initially be ridiculously easy and small, but it actually should be. That doesn’t mean doing 10 minutes of cycling. It means putting on your running shoes each morning, stepping outside the front door, and then stepping back inside.

If you’ve chronically struggled with picking up a fitness habit, doing things this way – no matter how ridiculous it feels – might really help to get your mind conditioned to the idea of your fitness routine. And, after you’ve performed your basic habit loop every day for a couple of weeks, you can start upping the intensity level incrementally until you’re doing real, heavy workouts, and are sticking with them pretty naturally.

Fuel yourself properly for all your workouts

People often start working out, specifically because they want to lose weight.

Often, this means that people try and establish fitness routines while they are also chronically starving themselves, and are feeling awful and drained on a daily basis.

Sure, you need to practice a bit of calorie restriction if you want to lose fat. But you have to do that carefully and delicately. Fuelling yourself properly for all your workouts is essential. If you do it right, you will feel energized. If you do it wrong, you will feel terrible, you’ll hate the workout, and you may even fall ill afterward.