When the last thing you want to do is exercise

Bundle your incentives

Last month, researchers published a megastudy testing the effectiveness of 54 approaches to motivating people to exercise more. The experiment, which enlisted more than 60,000 members of the 24 Hour Fitness chain as test subjects, found that offering a free audiobook was one of the most effective ways to get people to the gym. The idea was to give participants something to look forward to while exercising, said one of the study’s organisers, Katy Milkman, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and author of the book How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be.

It’s an approach familiar to Megan Roche. She enjoys taking photographs, and running gives her an opportunity to look for interesting things to shoot, especially while travelling. “These photos carry me through my running journey,” she said.

Make exercise a priority

“The No. 1 reason people give for not exercising is time,” Heinrich said, and the only reliable way to find the time is to prioritise it. “You have to make a decision to put exercise into your day; it’s not just magically going to happen.”

Johnston used to try and squeeze exercise into her life by doing things like taking the stairs instead of the elevator, “But that never really stuck or gave me any validation that I was doing anything meaningful,” she said. “Giving exercise a distinct place in my life was motivating.”

If you think of exercise as optional, you give yourself permission to skip it. Instead, try thinking of it as an essential part of your job, said Brad Stulberg, author of The Practice of Groundedness and a frequent writer about human performance. “Whether you are a parent, business person, physician, writer, artist, lawyer or educator, exercise will make you better at what you do,” he said. “It will help you focus, stay calm and collected, and improve your energy.”

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Be flexible

Making exercise a priority does not mean you need a rigid schedule. A study Milkman and some colleagues published in 2020 found that giving yourself flexibility to meet your goals might boost your chance of success. Researchers studied more than 2,500 Google employees, randomly assigning some of them to get paid for going to the company gym during a window of time they had identified in advance as the most manageable, while others could opt to go anytime.

The researchers had expected that committing to specific times would help people form stronger habits, said lead author John Beshears, a behavioral economist at Harvard Business School. Instead, the people who had been given flexibility ended up going more often after the payments ended. When the group on the rigid program missed their planned workout, they didn’t go at all, whereas the group that had practised finding the time continued to do so, Milkman said.

Get some support

“The best fitness motivator is a friend. They hold you accountable to show up and they support you when you don’t,” Stulberg said.

In one 2017 study, Heinrich interviewed CrossFit gym owners and coaches and found that feelings of community were a strong motivator for people who continued with the classes. “It’s not that you have to go, it’s that you want to go and are drawn in by the group,” she said.

Having a cheerleader on the sidelines can also give you a boost, Steltenpohl said, by affirming that you are putting in the work and acknowledging the obstacles you have faced. “If you work out alone, having someone to check in with can be helpful.”

Create an environment for success

Look for ways to make your surroundings more inviting for physical activity, Steltenpohl said. Find or create a place where exercise feels enticing. That could be a gym, a park, a walking path or even just your bedroom with an exercise mat and a fitness app, she said. The key is that your surroundings are priming you to succeed.

Roche usually runs first thing in the morning, and she prepares ahead of time by laying out her clothes, getting the coffee pot ready and queuing up an energetic music playlist while she gets ready to run. On winter mornings, she also turns on bright lights and occasionally warms her muscles first in a hot shower.

Anticipate how exercise will make you feel

It is tempting to think you are too stressed or tired to exercise, but often times exercise is exactly what you need to feel better. “You don’t need to feel good to get going, you need to get going to feel good,” Stulberg said.

Exercise can help you manage your moods, Steltenpohl said, and when you are feeling lousy, sometimes exercise is a powerful antidote. “When I get really frustrated, I find that’s a good time to take a walk.”

Johnston is motivated by how her workouts feel. “I really enjoy how it feels physically to use my muscles and do one concrete task,” she said. She is also urged on by the progress she achieves through weightlifting. “It’s impossible to make people understand the feeling of getting stronger, especially when they’re new at it,” Johnston said. It’s a benefit that happens pretty quickly, she said, and it can create a positive feedback loop.

If you slip, try to get back on track right away

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The most effective trick identified in the 24 Hour Fitness megastudy was to incentivise people to get back on track when they missed a session. In this scenario, people committed to coming to the gym on certain days and times, and if they missed one of these planned visits, they would get a reminder and also a chance to earn extra points if they made their next planned visit.

It did not take much — about 9 cents in extra points — to get people back to the gym, and Milkman theorises that it is the signal “don’t miss your workout twice” that nudged people, rather than the trivial bonus. You could imagine making this more potent by joining the gym with friends, she said.

Christie Aschwanden is the author of Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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