Three mindset tips for fitness success
When you fail to reach your health and fitness goals, how often have you thought “I just don’twantitenough” or“next timeI’ll bemoredisciplined”.
Unfortunately, thisiswhat societyleadsustobelieve. Disciplineisjustonefactorneededforbehaviourchange.
Part 2 of the Complete Fitness mini-series is Mindset. Without a good mindset we can have all the knowledge in the world about movement, nutrition, mental health and stress, but if we don’t know howtoimplementchangethen it’s worthless. Here’s3tipsyou canimplementrightnow:
1. The Power of Environment: Everythingwedoisthe resultoflotsoflittledecisions. Butourbrainandourenvironment might try to sway our choices. Every day we are influencedtovaryingdegreesby people, things we see, things wesmellandmore.
For example, when we do somethingwelike,suchashaving a slice of pizza, dopamine (a feel-good hormone) is released. So, the next time you
see or smell pizza, dopamine is released again, making you more likely to decide to have it. Our brains automatically stray from our health and fitnessgoals. Whatcanyoudoto counteractthis?
Removeunhelpfulcues– changeyourroutehomesoyou don’t walk past that fantastic pizza van. Don’t have chocolate in thehouse.
Increase helpful cues – get your exercise gear out the night before. Join a community of like-minded people in personoronline.
2. Creating an Action Plan: The first step is making sure we have something to worktowards, mostpeople will do this but stop there. It’s thehabitsweperformonadai
ly basis that get us to our goal. When we think about habits, we need to have consistency; health and fitness goals take time.
BJFogg, abehaviourscientist, has an effective, simple structure for creating habits:
Make them specific – whatgetsmeasured,getsmanaged. Eg, I am going to run for 20minutesthreetimesaweek, ratherthanI’mgoingtodocardio 3timesaweek.
Make them easy – once we get in the flow of building habits, they grow and grow. So, we want to make the habits really easy to complete so wesucceedandmoveontothe nextone. Thisalsotiesinwith picking something we enjoy. e.g. choosing to workout at home rather than the gym if you’re concerned about time constraintsorfeelingself-conscious.
■ Have a cue – Attaching a new habit on to an existing habitisagreatwayofensuring ithappens. Eg, whilethekettle is boiling, I’ll do10sit-ups.
3. Use All of the Tools:
Implementing one small change for a short period of time won’t have much impact. But, implementing lots of little changes over time will lead to big results. If we follow the above, setting our environmentforsuccessand creating habits which are really easy to implement, change won’t seem so difficult. Download my creating a habit template for free at www.olliebooth.com/ habits-download