From Weak to Peak: Building the Habit of Going to The Gym

Over the past year and a half, I’ve experimented a lot with workout routines in an effort to cut weight and look jacked. It took me a while to get into the swing of things.

Initially, the wind isn’t at your back. The combination of feeling ‘small’, being unathletic, the time commitment, and the fear of feeling like an idiot trying to understand how to exercise can dissuade the faint-hearted from beginning their exercise journey. 

Fortunately, there are ways to persist, and get started in ways that generally don’t require lots of will-power. Here’s what worked for me.

Make the gym convenient.

1. If you can go to the gym on the way to or from work, that’s ideal.
2. Keep a change of clothes in your car – if your objection to going is fashion faux pas, this can help to override it.
3. Go regularly, even if you don’t intend to work out hard. Most of the battle is getting to the gym. If you’re used to being in the same place at the same time, it’s easy.
4. Put the gym on your daily checklist if you have one. If not, schedule time specifically for it.

Make the gym fun

1. Talk to the front desk people and the people around you. Get a gym bro or squat sister. It feels good to have a regular squad of people you know, and social activities where you feel like you’re part of a community make it more rewarding.
2. When starting out, do exercises you personally find ‘fun’. If that means more time is spent playing basketball than doing deadlifts, and it works for you, approach it that way.
3. Look for victories! Hitting a PR is fun. There’s an infinite amount of ways you can hit PRs (Best 3 Rep Max after Running a Mile). You design the rules of the game, so there’s no reason you can’t win every time.

Make the gym easy

1. Learn to work out at a cheap commercial gym like Planet Fitness. The odds are you’re not the least out of shape person there, and the fear of hurting your ego is less if you can see yourself doing ‘well’.
2. Visualize yourself as a gym person. I used to see myself as a debate person, and thought that gyms were for ‘jock’ types. I’ve revised what I think a gym person is to include myself.
3. Reward yourself for going intermittently. Is there a show you can limit yourself to watching after the gym? A snack you can limit till after the gym?

Make laziness hard

1. Have an accountability buddy. For better or worse, people’s perceptions of you can shape behavior. If someone expects you to meet them, and you don’t, they bug you.
2. Money is a powerful motivation. Give a trusted friend a certain amount of money to donate to a charity you hate if you don’t follow through. I’m intending to design an application that does that automatically.
3. Eliminate highly stimulating/exciting things that get in the way. If you know you prefer Xbox to the gym, maybe not having Xbox around would change your decision calculus.
4. Track yourself. If you start being able to only lift the bar, being able to visualize the progress you’ve made can serve as reinforcing behavior.

Happy lifting!