5 Keys To Start Exercising

Starting to exercise is often one of the most difficult steps. The laziness of the first days, or the first weeks, can cause us not to create a habit related to sports and we abandon the idea before time.

Therefore, we show you some ways to overcome these difficulties and that initial laziness to have a greater willpower and enjoy the benefits that the practice of regular physical exercise can bring to our body. 

1. Define what physical exercise is for you

The idea of ​​”exercising” is usually not very well defined. Among the different ways of practicing sports can be: playing football, dancing, running, walking, doing yoga, going to the gym, swimming, etc. Therefore, to start exercising and creating a habit, it will be essential to determine what type of exercise we want to do. It must be one that we like, that we can easily include in our day-to-day life and that gives us the benefits we want to achieve.

Thus, if one of our main objectives is to increase our muscles, we can join a gym to do exercises with weights. If we want to lose weight, we can resort to running frequently and if we want to take advantage of the time dedicated to physical exercise to socialize and meet new people, we can opt for a team sport.

In addition, defining the type of exercise will mean setting a clear objective. Therefore, we should not think about going for a run, but set a goal of running every morning for 20 minutes in our neighborhood park. In this way, a more defined and visible objective will help us to better focus on the activity and accomplish it more easily.

2. Start with an easy exercise to do

If we are not used to practicing sports, an exercise that is too intense can exhaust us and make us feel rejection at the idea of ​​repeating it frequently. Therefore, it is best to start with simple and undemanding exercises, which help us to create the habit without feeling lazy when doing them. Little by little, we can increase the intensity of the exercise as our body adjusts to the practice.

3. Pick another habit as a reminder

This step will be quite important so that we do not forget to play sports when it is our turn. A reminder will help us to be aware of when it is time to start exercising and not to skip the activity unconsciously. The reminder should be another activity that we have already made into a habit, since this type of activity will be so internalized that we will not forget it.

As an example, we can exercise right after brushing our teeth, after having coffee in the morning or after making bed. Once the reminder is chosen, we can turn to advice number 1, setting a clear type of exercise, for a specific time and in a specific place.

4. Find a healthy reward

A good way to encourage ourselves to exercise can be to find a reward that we can enjoy after doing the activity. In this way, we can have more facility to overcome the initial laziness and feel good when we finish the activity, in addition to the mental well-being that the exercise practice itself will provide.

However, the important thing at this point will be to resort to healthy rewards, such as taking a relaxing bath, using a soap with a particularly pleasant aroma, taking an infusion or spending a few minutes listening to some music. On the contrary, setting rewards such as smoking a cigarette or having a piece of chocolate will be highly counterproductive measures.

5. Keep track of your progress

To better see the results obtained when exercising and that this helps us to continue with the routine, we can resort to methods such as taking photos every several weeks or taking measurements of the perimeters of our muscles, such as the biceps, the gut or thighs.

Seeing how we lose weight or how we gain muscle mass will help us to be more aware of the good results of our physical activity, motivating us to keep going. To put this measure into practice, we can also use mobile applications that give us the possibility of keeping a clearer record of our activity and our exercise routine.

As we can see, starting to exercise is not easy because we have to create a habit, but it provides many benefits. Following a healthy lifestyle will provide us with energy and above all, it will improve our mood.