If you want to achieve your fitness goals, the most important thing is to start with the right intrinsic motivation, after all: when the mind believes the body will follow.
Inhoudsopgave
If you don’t have the right intrinsic motivation, or if you don’t know how to bring this motivation back up for yourself, you may end up stranded and there’s a chance you won’t achieve your set goals. In this article, we want to offer you 6 motivation tips. With these 6 motivation tips, achieving your goals should become much easier.
Bepaal jouw intrinsieke motivatie
Each person’s intrinsic motivation can vary greatly. After all, if you look at the definition of motivation, it goes as follows:
Motivation is what drives an individual to certain behaviors. There’s a heavy personal aspect to this. This can be intrinsic motivation or extrinsic motivation. In the case of fitness, it goes like this.
Intrinsic motivation
Someone who is intrinsically motivated to participate in fitness or another sport enjoys practicing the sport. A football player loves the game and plays football for the sake of playing. That it helps maintain fitness is often a bonus.
Extrinsic motivation
Someone who is extrinsically motivated to participate in fitness or another sport does so to achieve a certain goal. Someone who is extrinsically motivated as a football player wants to win prizes, like the Champions League, or wants to earn a lot of money. He or she derives less motivation from the game itself.
Discipline versus intrinsieke motivatie
Most people start fitness with extrinsic motivation. Almost no one starts weight training “because it’s fun.” You want to look better, get stronger, be more muscular, or leaner. Until it becomes a habit to train and you can rely on routine, you will have to rely on pure self-discipline. Hang in there and know that once it becomes routine, you won’t know any better and it will take much less effort to get off the couch to go train.
Trainen met een trainingsmaatje
An old Dutch saying goes: shared pain is half pain. That’s not the main reason, but training together with a training buddy can help when you enter a period of decreasing motivation. Your training buddy can motivate you intrinsically and get you through this period. Of course, you can also provide this service to him or her if it happens the other way around.
In addition to being able to motivate each other in difficult phases, training with a buddy can also lead to better results in the gym. When you agree to meet someone at the gym at 8:00 p.m., you won’t stay on the couch that night. After all, someone is waiting for you.
In addition, training together in the gym can also lead to better results because you can spot each other. Spotting is helping the other person with the execution of the fitness exercise so that the person in question can train “until muscle failure.” This ultimately leads to a greater training stimulus, allowing for more muscle growth. Finally, training with a buddy also leads to competitive behavior, making you inclined to give just a little more than when you train alone. Oh, and did we mention that training together with someone is much more fun?
However, a caveat must be placed here. Think of mountain climbers who are connected to each other with a rope so that if one falls, the other can help. However, it also applies that if one falls, the other can be dragged along if he or she is not strong enough. Ultimately, you train for yourself. If your training partner can’t train one evening, it doesn’t mean you don’t have to train. Then you may encounter the problem that you no longer synchronize in terms of training schedule. So choose a serious training partner!
Laat je inspireren door role-models
For example, do you want to become big and muscular? Regularly watch videos of successful bodybuilders and/or read their books. After watching DVDs where enormous mass monsters lift weights, I personally can’t wait to dive into the gym.
Just search for fitness or bodybuilding motivation on YouTube or read Schwarzenegger’s old books and guaranteed you’ll work harder in the gym.
Pas je doelen aan jouw situatie aan
When you start with a specific sport goal-oriented, the chance is greater that you will actually achieve these goals. Divide a big goal into smaller goals, so that every training, every step gets you closer to your end goal. It can of course happen that you get injured or that something unexpected happens that requires you to adjust your goals. Be flexible and creative and don’t give up immediately. The road to success is never a straight line, so realize that you are not the first and certainly not the last to face a setback.
Variatie en afwisseling
To continuously challenge your body, variation and variation are necessary. Your body is a smart machine that will constantly seek balance, called homeostasis. If you expose your body to heavy training stimuli, it will arm itself to be stronger against it next time. But if you don’t intensify the training stimulus, your body will not adapt further than necessary.
The tricky part here is that repetition leads to routine more quickly. Although routine, as mentioned, makes it easier to stick with it, it also quickly forms the pitfall that you do the same thing every time and achieve less result. So the routine should consist of the fact that you train, not how you train!
Houd je voortgang bij
Measurement is knowledge, so too with fitness. If you keep track of your progress and set small mini-goals for yourself, the chances are high that you will be more successful than if you don’t. Keep track of your progress in a training logbook and measure the number of reps and sets and weights you do per exercise. Also measure your own body statistics, such as your weight, your BMI, and your body fat percentage. Keep track of what happens when you make adjustments to your training, diet, or supplement use.
Download de FITsociety app
Once you have grasped your intrinsic motivation, you can start working on achieving your goals. To do this as effectively as possible, you can track your progress via the FITsociety app. If you miss a workout or indulge in meals and snacks one time, it’s immediately visible. This makes it visual for yourself. You can also enlist the help of personal trainers and other coaches via the FITsociety app who can then get you back on track.
