How to MOTIVATE yourself to get to the gym daily

I recently read this beautiful article by Katie Jack on Quora which answers this question int he best possible way. I am, therefore, pasting it here for all the readers.

I’m going to tell you a little secret that a lot of people don’t like to hear.

Are you ready?

Motivation is bullshit.

That’s right. You heard me. In terms of reaching goals, getting through bad days, and completing tasks that you might not necessarily want to do, motivation is bullshit.

Let me break it down. There are typically two key steps to achieving a goal:

Motivate yourself.
Cultivate discipline.

What’s the difference between the two?

Motivation generally operates on the belief that you need to be in a particular mental or emotional state in order to complete a task.

Discipline operates on the belief that inner mental states and emotions should be separated from outward functioning.

For example, when given the choice between eating broccoli or eating cake, operating purely on motivation would mean that you wait until you like broccoli more than you like cake before you start eating the broccoli, because cake tastes better.

You wait until you actually want to do the not-so-fun task to do it.

Discipline, however, would mean that you eat the broccoli even if you’d rather eat the cake because broccoli is better for you.

You do the not-so-fun task even if you don’t want to do it.

The reality is that most of us would much rather eat the cake than the broccoli, but if we wait until we feel like eating the broccoli to actually eat it, we’re all going to have pretty bad health.

Another example is how some people put off going to the gym for years because they just “don’t feel like it.” But you don’t wait until you’re in the physical shape of an Olympic athlete to start training, do you? It doesn’t work like that. You train to get into the physical shape of an Olympic athlete.

If you’re always waiting to be motivated or inspired in order to get started on a task, you’re essentially fucking yourself over and falling for the fantasy that we should always do what we feel like doing.

Life doesn’t work that way.

Although motivation is often an essential step when setting a goal (you get inspired to get fit when you see a picture of a model or get inspired to get an A on a test when your friend gets a better grade than you), motivation is not going to get you where you want to be.

Think about the last time you got motivated to do something. How long was it until your motivation ran out and you gave up? A week? A day? An hour?

Motivation comes in short bursts and typically only lasts for an hour or two at most. Motivation is fickle and driven purely by emotion. Motivation causes you to act on impulse and make inconsistent decisions. Motivation is different every day. Motivation is not going to get you through the tough times when you want to give up. Motivation is not going to help you through the bad days when quitting feels like the only option. Motivation has a tiny shelf life and constantly needs to be replaced and refreshed. Motivation won’t enable you to achieve your goals, and will never be useful in the long run.

Contrary to the popular believe in current society, motivation is not the answer.

Discipline is what you need.

Motivation is what gets you started, but cultivating self discipline is what keeps you going. Motivation is not going to help you achieve your goals in the long haul, not matter how much of it you had when you started. Whether it’s running a marathon or earning a degree or eating your broccoli, you are not always going to feel like finishing something you set out to do, no matter how much motivation you had when you began. Motivation is what gets inspires you to get moving. cultivating self discipline is how you maintain your momentum. Discipline is the only thing that will remove impulse and emotion from your decision-making process and help you sustain your momentum over time.

The point of discipline is to cut the link between feelings and actions.

You’re not always going to be motivated to do things that suck. And the reality of the life is that you’re often going to have to do a lot of things that suck whether you’re motivated to or not, simply because they need to be done. You’re not always going to be inspired to eat the broccoli or make the PowerPoint or run the marathon. But these things need to get done.

The point of discipline is that you get shit done that you may really not want to do, and then you get to feel good afterwards. Not the other way around. You eat the broccoli, make the PowerPoint, and run the marathon, all things which can generally not be so fun while you’re doing them, and then you get to feel good after you’re done with the task or after you’ve reached your goal.

Consider this analogy:

You want to drive somewhere in your car.

Turning the key to start the ignition is motivation.

The fuel in the car is self-discipline.

Yes, putting the key in the car to start the ignition is important to get going, but you have to have fuel if you want your car to be able to withstand the highs and lows of the land in order to reach your destination.

Now apply this analogy to real life. You look at a picture of a model and say to yourself, “I want to get fit.” There’s your motivation. The key has been turned and the ignition has been started. In order to achieve this goal, however, you’re going to have eat healthy and work out every day, whether you have the motivation to or not. This is your discipline. This is your fuel. You set a goal and you plan how you are going to achieve it. And then you stick to that plan on the days that you are motivated to do so, and also on the days you are not. Discipline is commitment.

Here are some harsh truths:

You are not always going to be inspired.

You are not always going to have the motivation to get stuff done.

You are going to have bad days.

You are going to have low points.

You are going to want to quit.

But if you have discipline, you will get through all of these things. You willsurvive the lows, the twists and turns, the forks in the road, and the days when your really just want to do nothing but give up.

For consistent, long term results, discipline will always trump motivation. Discipline is the only thing that is going to give you the commitment, consistency, and patience that you need to achieve your goals. And the funny thing is, once you cultivate self discipline, it will start to become a way of life. You will want to cultivate more of it. And, although it sounds strange, you will begin to derive a bit of inspiration and motivation from your own self discipline.

So quit trying to get inspired all of the time. It’s a bullshit approach and a waste of energy. It’s a counterproductive approach to productivity. Instead, prioritize. Set goals. Focus. Don’t deviate. Don’t get distracted. Persist. Success is not ultimate. It’s a continuous process. Screw doing things when you’re motivated to do them.

Because if you wait until you actually feel like doing something to do it, you’ll be waiting for forever.

If you like the stuff, check out the original link where this article was posted:

https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-motivate-yourself-to-exercise-every-day

Here is the link to the author’s profile: https://www.quora.com/profile/Katie-Jack-4

Little Imperfections

Nobody is born perfect. However, the little imperfections we have can haunt our psychic disturbing our mental peace. A point to note here is that the imperfection may not be causing us loss but the feelings associated with it may be damaging us gravely. Below I discuss three small real-life cases where I witnessed how slight imperfections can hamper a healthy mindset, and how one can fight through it.

Case 1: A friend of mine recently started witnessing receding hairline. Mind you, he is just 23 years old. “Genetic reasons”, he said. His father had a similar issue and so did his grandfather. He feared how he would lose confidence if he lost all hair. He saw his imperfection staring at him.

Case 2: He was born with the mind of a powerful man but with legs of polio. His right leg was half the size of the left one, baring acting as a stick. It resembled as if he was walking with a stick, just that stick had skin on it. He lived through bullying and being thrown around. He had no friends, no confidence, no real purpose. His imperfection was staring right at him.

Case 3: When I was 9 years old, I was diagnosed with Gynecomastia. I had swollen nipples, which at my age appeared breasts developing, which was odd because I was a male. It was caused due to hormonal imbalance. I have lived in shame and guilt of having swollen nipples for a long time. Hiding them behind clothes made my wardrobe options shrink as fast as my confidence. It was my imperfection staring right at me.

Think about it. Does one thing, one imperfection, need to define who you really are? Will one small genetic mistake decide the fate of your vanity? Will one disease alone be enough to poison your entire childhood and threaten all your future?

NO.

Not if you are willing to read on and follow what I am going to write next.

To all the people feeling they aren’t perfect physically, to all those who believe they look hideous, to all those who believe they don’t have confidence, I say this: WORKOUT.

Workout. Period.

You see, when you workout and start improving your fitness, you will initiate this transformation. Now this transformation, be very careful, is three-dimensional. Most people feel that it just works in one direction: make you gain muscle. This is wrong. Read on!

When you constantly workout, stretch the limits of your body, improve your core strength, your body changes. Your muscles grow to the size and shape they should be in, the way natures designed us to be. The fat goes away and your face becomes prominent. Your posture improves and so does the amount of face you choose to lift. Your body becomes better by each passing day. This is the first dimension.

Next is the changes you would feel at a mental level. You witness the physical transformation and you gain confidence. The perception you have for your own self-changes. Here the feeling of achieving something you thought was so difficult also comes into play. You see this as a stepping stone towards greater goals in life. This is the second dimension.

When you lift iron in the gym, you embrace pain. The way our muscles grow is very simple. The muscle does two motions: contraction and expansion. Now when you do any exercise, you engage a particular muscle in these two motions. When you work that muscle out, it tears off a bit. How much this muscle will tear depends on how hard your workout has been on that muscle. In other words, how much you have exhausted that muscle. Next, you fill your system with protein which helps bind that muscle together. Combined with proper rest, the muscle recovers and is bigger in size, stronger in strength. Now for this to happen, you constantly need to tear that muscle, workout after workout.
To explain it better, let’s look at it from another point of view. They say it doesn’t matter if you do 5 reps per set or 20 reps per set, it matters how many reps you do after the muscles start to pain. Muhammad Ali once said he didn’t count his reps before it started paining. Only the reps we do bearing that pain really count in making us stronger and bigger. So in order to grow, we must embrace pain in increasing quantities in every subsequent workout we do.
Now when you take on so much pain in the gym, something changes. It is a spiritual experience that you witness in which it becomes easier for you to push through the pain. It is this exercise of moving against the pain that we do in the gym that provides that spiritual bend in our life. We start seeing things differently.
We understand the pain of others better because we then recognize pain better.
We don’t feel pain in normal life so much because of what we feel inside the gym.
Everything becomes clearer under pain and the moment we start embracing it inside our gym workout, we also start embracing it in our life. This is the third dimension, where how we look at pain and growth changes.

This is the way workouts improve your life. It is hard to find people who undergo such physical transformations and still remain confused, directionless or sad in their lives. The reason is simple: you gain perspective over your limits, pain and get the confidence to start planning for other aspects of life too.

I believe everyone should thus stretch their limits and get to the best physical form they can be in before deciding to give up on their imperfections and before kneeling down in defeat.

Thanks for reading. 🙂

The Mathematics of fat loss.

This topic is based on incredible talk by Ruben Meerman.

Let me start by asking you all a question. When we loose weight, say go from 80 to 70 kg, where does the remaining lost weight, here 10 kg, go?

Sweat? Stool? Energy?

The chemical formula of human fat is C55 H104 O6. There are a few variations between number of carbon and hydrogen atoms but oxygen remains same at 6 per atom.

So the reaction at weight loss goes like this:

C55 H104 O6 + 78 O2 —————————→ 55 CO2 + 52 H2O + Kj

Fat + oxygen gives carbon dioxide, water and energy.

How much each?

84% carbon dioxide and 16% water.

So if you were to loose 10 kg fat, you would be needing to loose 8.4 kg CO2 and 1.6 kg water.

NO SPECIAL DIET, NO SPECIAL ROUTINE, NO GREEN TEA

You just need to eat less and move more.

Let me elaborate them both. Eat less would mean you are consuming less calories than what you are needing to function in the day.

The second and more important one is move more which basically decides the pace of your weight loss. Now as we know for loosing 10 kg, we need to loose 8.4 kg carbon dioxide. But how do we do it? The only way you can do it is through your lungs pumping it out. Which would mean breathe more.

So does that mean if we sit and breathe more, we will be loosing weight?

No, but you will enter a medical state called hyperventilation wherein your body is getting more oxygen than is needs. You might need medical attention then.

So how do we do it? How do we make our own body require more breaths?

Simple: by creating a need for it.

When you do any physical activity, involving your muscles, your heart starts pumping more blood to those areas. Hence, to pump more blood, it starts beating faster and harder. Working in accordance with the heart are your lungs, which immediately sense need of oxygen inside and thus starts giving signals to increase breathing. Your breathes increase, resulting in giving off maximum carbon dioxide, thus reducing your weight. Bonus is the sweat which you release, containing the water molecules and also toxins from your body.

Hence, the ONLY way to decrease your weight is to exhale more carbon dioxide.

How being regular at workouts changes your life.

Well, if you talk about physical transformation, you search for two extreme images to be on display. The better the physical contrast between them, the bigger the transformation. Most people display huge arms, skinny waists and six pack abs, but is that the only benefit workout has to offer to you?

I am going to talk about how the time I spend in the gym affects the rest of my day.

First things first, the sleep. I am a firm believer of the quote ‘Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.’ Hence, I try to hit the bed before 11 PM everyday. However, I may hit the bed at right time, but how do I make the sleep take over? Do you ever experience days when you wish to sleep off but are unable to? No mater how much you try, you cannot sleep. You keep tossing and turning in bed, realizing how time was getting wasted.

Well, I had such nights too. However, things are different for each day I hit the gym. The days I don’t workout, I am susceptible. However the days I hit the gym, my body tires up nicely and is ready for a deep sleep. All I need to do is feed it well and put it in bed ASAP.

One other thing to notice here is the quality of sleep. Post workout sleep is a deep one, the one unaffected by most nearby disturbances. It is at length sleep, doesn’t break in between. Hence, fulfills the sleep needs of the body nicely.

Secondly, my diet and weight regulations. Most people are fighting with weight and fat related issues. They either are too slim or too obese and fight to get in proper shape. Now the approach matters a lot, as we see how people despite getting in proper shape for once, loose it again in some time because of the wrong approach inherited to begin with.

I have an endomorph body type, meaning my body would put on and maintain fat tissues easily. I had major issues with my body fat content, which was more than 40%. I was over 110 kg at 6 feet, a bad sight.

However, workout helped me in this arena. The way workout worked was in two stages:

Put my body in a position where my body fat was reasonable and I has measurable muscle strength and stamina.
From there on, help me understand how to modulate weight according to my own requirements and routines.

Now both the aspects had study of diets included, as what I eat when I workout forms the basis of my development. Let me explain how each of these steps work.

In the first one, you embark on the journey of reducing the fat content of your body. For me, it began with me understanding the anatomy of human body and how it works. Then there were dietary plans, workout regimes and a lot of dedicated effort over a long period of time. There were no shortcuts and after a couple of years, the fat percentage was close to 15 while the weight was 80 kg. Overcoming the obesity was fruit numero uno of working out.

The second phase is more important one and stays active for a longer time. Now when I was in the shape I wanted to be in, I had two questions:

How to I retain this physical state forever? How do I make sure I don’t become fat again?
What else can I do with this body now, to further enhance it?

Actually, the answers to both question were inter-linked. I needed to stay physically active to stay in shape. I also wanted to develop a good strong heavy built for which I required a special workout and diet plan altogether. Now since my body was, due to years of hard work put in loosing fat the right way, in good form stamina and strength wise, I could take it anywhere from here. I could go for power-lifting, gymnastics, swimming, etc.

I worked on gaining some muscle first, went on to 200 pounds with 15% body fat. Workout gave me knowledge and base line to develop future fitness targets.

The other important aspect was diet. Now different fitness programs require different dietary patterns, but let’s leave that on the side for now. In our regular days as well, we see issues with diet plan disturbances. We skip meals, feel less hungry at times due to numerous things going around in our mind. What goes in the mind directly affects our appetite.

Let me give a small example here. Let’s say I had an issue with my boss and returned home in a very foul mood. This would definitely affect my appetite, I may not wish to eat then. Even if I try, the food will do more harm then good if eaten with such improper mental thoughts.
What I can do instead is hit the gym, get on with my workout. This will channel my heightened emotional state’s energy into body building. This will also create post-workout hunger which will compel me to crave food from within, no matter how the day was.

Thirdly, the oozing confidence and never-ending energy. I lift heavy weight in gym, workout to great extents, I run long miles…. I put my body through hell. However, I live through that pain and it prepares me. It prepares me for the rest of the day. A flat tire then, raised petrol prices or angry boss cannot bring me pain now, I have seen much worse in the gym!

No physical distance is too much, I feel energetic to have conquered the weights in the morning itself. I am feeling good too, my muscles are toned and tight. My grip is good, head in it’s right place. I feel like I can take on anything!

Fourth, the amazing sex. For enjoying sex to it’s optimum level, one needs to be in a certain physical state. This state would require flexibility, stamina, strength, endurance as some of the physical attributes. A good workout provides all this. Hence, the act becomes more enjoyable, the person involved can last longer, have strength to try various positions.

Fifth, looking good without clothes. There are people who require make up and clothes to look desirable. However, a good worked out body requires nothing else. People put on sparkly clothes to hide the deformities underneath those layers. However, when you workout and remove them from within, you don’t need to cover anything up!

When I was fat, I used to avoid light colored t-shirts for obvious reasons. There’s a reason why black is every fat person’s favorite color. I used to inhale deeply while roaming around, to hide my belly fat. I also used to make it a point not to enter pool area in parties for water reveals truth from behind the clothes.
But after loosing fat and getting good physique, I was free to have choice of colors, I could take off my shirt anywhere and would gain appreciation for what would reveal.

All theses benefits, and numerous more which I can maintain a diary for, I appeal you all to get up and work out.

Cheers.

NO-TIME WORKOUT

So there has been a big transition in my life: I am back in school! From office life to b-school. The life here in my b-school is very rigorous and demanding. From classes to projects, from teams to simulations, from CV preparations to clubs & committees, from events planning to all the parties! To say the least, we got no time to sleep.

With no time to sleep, it’s evident I have no time to workout too! But what will happen if I don’t workout? I rot and die in vain.

I sat down with a pen and paper. Set my next fitness goal, broke down exercises for it and diet required. Diet was tricky, as I had limitations of sticking to inside-school resources. Next, I worked on time, which was the bottle neck here. I figured out I could squeeze my workout till the extent of it going from 2 hours everyday to 1 hour every second day. I, thus, had a plan.

My plan was to gain muscle. I was at 84 kg, needed to be at around 92 kg. 8 kg to go. I was to follow power-lifting program. For each day, I decided to dedicate half hour solely to single power-lifting exercise. It was a cycle between bench-press, squat and dead-lifts. Although I must admit, I did skip a few sessions of squats and bench-press just to dead-lift. I am inclined towards that exercise, as it works out entire body and also gives immense burn.

For remaining 30 min, I was to workout on other prominent muscle groups. Like day 1 could see a good amount of bicep-curls being thrown around for biceps and some pressing for shoulders while day 3 could see a few rows for that taper back with some extensions for tricep heads. This way, I was shaping my muscles while packing real strength.

For the diet part, I stuck to what I knew best: carbs. I had 10 boiled eggs for breakfast, with a litre milk, some breads. Lunch would see 3–4 chapatis with loads of pulses and veggies. A good burger in the evening snack for extra calorie boost, followed by skipping dinner for meeting deadlines.

I am at 90 kg now, on day 33. I have gained a few extra inches of fat which would require some running on my part.

The point here is that I could do things with my physique in good time even with short amount of time being devoted. The key aspect was planning. We may go inside our new routine hoping to be able to shape workout routine with new routine, but without proper planning, we see us neglecting fitness for meeting deadlines. It is important we realise this trap and work on it.

So what should be done?

Write down your fitness goal. It could be a number you wish to see on your weighing scale, it could be number of inches you want your biceps to be of, or number of abs. Write it down.
Break the goal into body parts. For example, if my agenda is to go from 110 kg to 80 kg, my target areas would be fat, lack of muscle. I would work on these two.
For each part, identify the exercises required. So for the hypothetical me, the fat burning would require me to engage in intense cardio movements.
Next, map exercises to time required and squeeze that. So if I require 30 min running for 5 days a week, I would break it down to a 15-min H.I.I.T (High Intensity Interval Training) session for 3 days in a week. With this, I have reduced time requirements without compromising on the promising output.

And that’s it, you have your new work out plan! The only thing needed now is for you to stick to it!

Guys, we make plans for everything. Routines for every activity. It is important we sit down and plan our workout, creating some space for fitness in our busy schedules. It’s am investment that won’t ever ditch you!