If you’ve been practicing a given sport for a long period of time, things can get stale.
Some sports are easier to keep fresh than others. In climbing, there’s always a new environment to test your skills, new routes to master, holds or footholds that require more practice. It can take years before you first experience burnout.
In some activities, you might need more creativity to come up with ways to make your workouts fun and challenging again. In addition to setting “regular” long-term goals, add objectives that can quickly lead to visible improvements.
In tennis, you can set a goal to improve your forehand, but if it’s already great, then the improvements will probably be too small to notice quickly (and thus, not very motivating). While practicing your forehand to make it even better should remain a part of your routine, setting an additional goal related to a different skill – for instance, smashes – will inject a bit more fun into your sessions.
In jogging, consider switching regular jogging with sprints or hill sprints. Completely change your route. Start jogging with someone else. Change your playlist (or switch from music to podcasts). Work on improving your speed and not just endurance.
In cycling, make sure to vary your routes – ride uphill, downhill, longer routes, shorter ones, and so on. If you constantly go on the same exact bike ride, things are guaranteed to get boring quickly.
When practicing your chosen sport, switch your focus to something fresh to introduce newness in your workouts.
For instance, when I go climbing, I not only try completely different routes requiring skills I use rarely, but also sometimes give myself a specific “theme” for the day – for instance, balancing or footwork. With just a few such themes (footwork day, balance day, finger day, overhanging walls day, or endurance day with more traversing), it’s easy to make each of your workouts distinct and more interesting.
Don’t forget about the “challenging” part. When you’re a beginner, everything is challenging, so everything is motivating. Your first proper serve in tennis, your first scaled wall, your first mile of jogging, it’s all new.
Yet, when you already have some skills, there’s temptation to stick to what’s easy and no longer have what the Zen Buddhists call the “beginner’s mind” or shoshin. Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki writes in his book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few”[xxxvi].
Practice with an open mind and readiness to get the most out of new opportunities for improvement. An attitude of eagerness and openness will keep boredom out of your workouts while guaranteeing further growth and fun.