Imagine there’s a pill that improves your ability to resist temptations and persevere. Your life is now so much better because it’s so much easier to achieve your goals. The pill also provides other benefits like:
- a significant decrease in perceived stress and emotional distress,
- reduced smoking, alcohol and caffeine consumption,
- an increase in healthy eating,
- improved emotional control,
- an increase in attendance to commitments and maintenance of household chores,
- an increase in monitoring of spending,
- an improvement in study habits.
There are no side effects, and it’s vastly available everywhere you go for free or a very low price. How many pills would you like to order today if such a pill existed?
Well, it actually does exist, though not in pill form. It’s called exercise. All of the benefits listed above come from a 2006 Australian study on 24 non-exercisers between 18 and 50 who regularly exercised for a 2-month period (just once a week for the first month and three times a week for the second month)[i], and it’s just one out of hundreds, if not thousands, of studies exploring the positive effects of exercise.
There’s no question that regular physical activity is not an option – it’s a necessity for both your mind and your body.
The aforementioned pill would instantly become a global bestseller. Unfortunately, exercise doesn’t sell that well. The 2014 United States American National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) paints a dire picture. Among adults aged 18 and over, 30.2% of Americans are considered inactive with respect to aerobic activity guidelines and 19.8% of them are insufficiently active[ii].
Moreover, only 3.2% met full muscle-strengthening guidelines, 28.5% met full aerobic activity guidelines and just 21.4% met full guidelines for both aerobic activity and muscle strengthening.
According to a 2009 study[iii], the second most common barrier for exercise habit (after a lack of support) was a lack of willpower. Herein lies the difficulty in marketing exercise – something taking time and effort – when compared to a pill generating instant results.
Fortunately, while the magic pill doesn’t exist, exercise does. It also isn’t so hard to introduce into your life that you need to wait for the pill to appear. All you need are proven practical techniques and strategies to form a habit of exercise.
As the author of books like How to Build Self-Discipline: Resist Temptations and Reach Your Long-Term Goals, Daily Self-Discipline: Everyday Habits and Exercises to Build Self-Discipline and Achieve Your Goals, and Self-Disciplined Dieter: How to Lose Weight and Become Healthy Despite Cravings and Weak Willpower, self-discipline is my main area of expertise.
I want to help you break through the most common barriers for making exercise a part of your life and finally develop a permanent habit of it so you can become healthier, more vibrant, joyful, and enjoy other benefits regular physical exercise provides.
In the following pages you’ll learn:
- how to get motivated to exercise. We’ll dig deep into three different kinds of motivation, two additional opposing types of motivation, and how they can all help you get more active. We’ll also cover practical strategies to handle procrastination;
- how to find time to exercise, which is a common reason why people are inactive. You’ll learn about the horrible trade-off you’re making when you don’t exercise because of a lack of time. You’ll also learn when to exercise and numerous non-obvious ways to make more time for exercise;
- how to stay motivated to exercise. Often it’s easy to start, but hard to keep going. You’ll learn a wide variety of ways to improve motivation, how to take a break and not destroy your habit of exercise, as well as discover how to prevent injuries, reduce soreness, and improve recovery so you can’t make excuses because of pain;
- how to enjoy exercise. Tips on how to enjoy exercise are peppered throughout the book, but in this chapter we’ll focus entirely on the simplest (and most effective) piece of advice that will most likely transform your entire attitude toward exercise (if you’ve always had trouble maintaining a regular exercise habit, it’s possible you’re the victim of this bad approach, often praised in fitness gyms);
- how to deal with other exercise-related issues like dealing with other people, managing your expectations related to physical activity, and dealing with discomfort, self-criticism, and feeling awkward when visiting the gym for the first time or trying a new sport.
If you haven’t been exercising for a long time, chances are you’ve grown to believe exercise is not for you or that you’re not strong enough – either mentally or physically – to act on the knowledge from this book.
Fortunately, nothing can be further from the truth, and there are simple – though not always easy – ways to fix this attitude. When put together and acted upon, the six chapters in this book – supported by over 80 references to scientific studies and credible experts – will help you form a new habit and make one of the most important changes you’ll ever make in your life.
Let’s embark on the journey now to learn how.