Finding the motivation to begin and/or continue with a health and fitness behaviour.
Struggling to find the motivation?
It’s a common problem for many when it comes to changing behaviours or adding one that would ultimately be beneficial.
You may have been told its all about willpower, just getting yourself to do it etc., but this is rarely helpful.
You may be able to rally enough willpower to engage in the behaviour occasionally, but to stay motivated and engage consistently, it helps to have a better understanding of the inner processes and emotions involved in motivation and how you can leverage them to achieve your goals.
I’m sure you’ve experienced high amounts of motivation for certain behaviours, so let’s see how you can transfer this to health and fitness behaviours like consistently strength training!
There are a number of stages within the behaviour change process. Ideally, you want to progress from being unaware/pre-contemplating (this is the stage where you’re not engaged) to thinking about it and planning (you’re now engaged) and then finally to pursuing and carrying out the behaviour on a consistent basis (to the point that it is a habit).
What propels you through these stages? This is where motivation comes in. There are different kinds of motivational processes that include: approach (appetitive), avoidance (aversive) and assertion (assertive).
1. Approach: This kind of motivation is where you expect a reward in the form of positive emotions and good feelings. For example, if you love the feeling you get from exercise and you seek it out of anticipation of those positive feelings, this is approach motivation at work.
2. Avoidance: This is where you engage in the behaviour to avoid threat and punishment and is associated with the negative emotions like anxiety and fear. The reward you receive is a sense of relief due to being able to relax/experience no stress. For example, you see that you’re gaining weight and experiencing worse quality of life, so you engage in exercise to ensure you don’t keep adding weight.
3. Assertion: This is where you don’t want anything new, you’re happy and content to be in your current state, you have no drive to change, and you experience the feel good hormones that are related to a restful and relaxed state.
• If you experience approach or avoidance motivation, you will seek out the relevant behaviour (in our case, training/exercise).
• If you experience assertion, you’ll maintain your current behaviour and there’s no drive to change anything because you’re content with the current behaviour.
In the initial stages of behaviour change (before you’re engaging in the behaviour consistently), we obviously want the approach or avoidance motivation because it’s driving you towards change and reward.
Assertion motivation is helpful when you’ve been consistently engaging in the behaviour and you’re happy with it (it has become a habit that you don’t feel needs changing).
The initial stages of behaviour change are skipped if the behaviour and the motivation behind it are on an unconscious level. For this discussion, let’s talk about it being on a conscious level (i.e. you can’t find the motivation to train).
If you’re reading this, you’re beyond the ‘unaware’ stage (you know something needs to be done).
To elicit some kind of motivational response that moves you from the stage of thinking about it, weighing up the advantages/disadvantages and to begin planning, how great the reward you’ll get is important.
There are so many benefits to strength training, one of the following (or you may have one of your own) should resonate (with a bit of thought, reflection and introspection) and be a big enough potential reward to elicit a motivational response:
Improved body composition/body satisfaction/confidence (you’ll look great), you’ll get sick less often, you’ll enjoy a better quality of life as you age (which includes still being able to physically do the things you love), your risk of various chronic diseases declines, you’ll better be able to manage your weight, you’ll recover better from injuries and illnesses, your cognitive functioning will be at its best, you can transform your mental health, your productivity improves, you sleep better, you experience positive emotions and good feelings, you’ll get injured less often, you feel more energetic and its even an opportunity to incorporate other health behaviours like meditation that make you feel even better!
The more it hits an emotional pain point, or potential for great reward/feeling, the better. The motivational processes that get you to do something are very much grounded in those strong emotions.
Making a concrete plan is an important part of the behaviour change process. As with anything, your chances of success are going to be a lot higher with a solid plan.
For training, there isn’t going to be a one-size-fits-all but here are some general guidelines to help with your plan:
Plan for at least two to three strength training sessions in, and at least two aerobic sessions in each week. (more details found here: "Should I Be Doing Cardio Or Strength Training?")
Too short on time for that? read this: Short On Time And Training Feels Overwhelming? Here’s A Program For You
New to strength training and want an easy place to start from the comfort of your home? You can find a program at the end of this article: Will Strength Training Prevent Injuries?
Want to make your own program with your own exercises? Choose a few of the exercises (at least one from each category) at the end of this article that feel the best: Must-Do Exercises!
Write down your plan, have a program, have solutions or alternatives to issues and other responsibilities that may pop up along the way.
Once you’ve begun pursuing the behaviour and start seeing some rewards (whether its avoiding the pain of something or getting good feelings), you begin to learn that these rewards are associated with that behaviour and it makes you more likely to continue to seek it out and engage with it.
In our context, you may experience excitement from seeing the weights you lift increase, the good feelings you feel at the end (or throughout) your training session, the social interaction you get with your workout buddy or coach, and so on. Or, it may be the reward of seeing your bodyweight slowly move down, the relief that you’re doing something about your ageing body and reduced physical function etc. It depends how you’ve framed it.
Alongside this, to keep those motivational processes flowing, you can use ‘nudges’ and frame the behaviour a certain way.
Nudges: One form of nudging called ‘priming’ is about setting up your environment in a way that encourages you to engage in the behaviour. So, this could be making the health behaviours you want to engage in more accessible and the ones you don’t want to less accessible. For example, you could leave some of your exercise gear in the path of your daily routine.
Other nudges could include behaviour contracts (an agreement with your coach or training partner that is signed), reminders (set yourself reminders to exercise or receive them from an app), planning prompts (being asked by a close friend about how your goal is going) and social support (training partner/coach – a big one!) (2)
Framing: I’ve discussed the importance of positive emotions and their role here is very relevant. There’s an advantage to approach motivation (positive emotions) rather than avoidance motivation (negative emotions). This is because when exercise is framed in a positive light (eg. “I’d love to exercise more to feel energetic, sleep better, feel great after the session etc.) you get greater brain plasticity (learning and associating exercise with beneficial rewards) and you seek out other behaviours that are health-promoting. (deeper dive here: “Want To Train More Consistently? The Role of Positive Emotions (And Play)”
If you’ve framed it in a negative light (eg. “I need to stop being so inactive because I’m looking fatter and feel terrible”), you still get the motivation to do something but you also get a lot more stress hormones, coping mechanisms, become defensive and so on. You’re less likely to seek out other health-promoting behaviours.
• Need more solutions to sticking with your exercise plan? Here are more strategies: “Why Can’t I Stick to a Health and Fitness Behaviour?”
Ideally you want to be in a place where you’ve been consistently performing the behaviour (the maintenance phase) and can now rely on the habit and ‘assertion motivation’. As discussed above, this is the form of motivation where you’re experiencing feel-good hormones/relaxed, you have no drive to change your new behaviour (which means sticking with exercise) and ultimately you’re happy and content with your exercise routine!
To move yourself from a state of inaction (where you’re lacking the motivation) to one of planning, engaging with and ultimately turning a sought-after behaviour into a habit, there are different motivational processes that will get you there. The emotional responses you experience from the potential reward/relief you’ll receive is a major part of creating the motivation and by leveraging rewards, ‘nudges’ and ‘framing’ you can keep the motivation flowing until the behaviour becomes a habit!
*This blog post was based on my interpretation and practical application of the theory discussed in the following paper (1): Michaelsen, Maren M, and Tobias Esch. “Motivation and reward mechanisms in health behavior change processes.” Brain research vol. 1757 (2021): 147309. doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2021.147309
1) Michaelsen, Maren M, and Tobias Esch. “Motivation and reward mechanisms in health behavior change processes.” Brain research vol. 1757 (2021): 147309. doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2021.147309
2) Möllenkamp, Meilin et al. “The effectiveness of nudges in improving the self-management of patients with chronic diseases: A systematic literature review.” Health policy (Amsterdam, Netherlands) vol. 123,12 (2019): 1199-1209. doi:10.1016/j.healthpol.2019.09.008
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