If you’re someone just can’t seem to stick to a fitness routine, it may be tempting to just come home and let yourself slack. Maybe you look at all your friends who keep up with their fitness routines and you just wonder how the heck they do it. A new study may reveal the answer, and it’s one that you can take advantage of, too.
As it turns out, there’s a secret health trick to this routine-building that a lot of people don’t even know they’re doing: You have to make exercise a habit.
Turn your fitness plan into habit with a trigger. Maybe it’s hearing an alarm, maybe it’s feeling stressed out, but whatever it is, working out becomes something you don’t think about, you just do.
This is called an instigation habit, and a recent study showed that an instigation habit was the main factor for seeing who actually exercised over a long-term period. It appears that if you have that trigger-induced habit set up, everything else is more likely to fall into place.
It also appears that over time, the habit only gets stronger. The study looked at both the instigation habit and the execution habit—that is, what you actually do when you work out. The instigation habit got a lot stronger over time, but the execution habit didn’t matter as much. This means that it’s not doing the same thing at the gym over and over that helps you stick to it, so don’t worry about that. You may want to stick to the same thing when you start out, just so your body knows what to expect, but it’s the trigger that counts, not the actual content of the routine.
This is great news for people who are trying to really find a way to stick to their routine. Try setting an alarm on your phone for the days and times that you want to make it to the gym, and before you know it, it’ll be something that you don’t even have to think about.
