3 Tricks To Stay Motivated To Work Out

January is over and by this time many new year’s resolutions are slowly slipping through the cracks. The following three tips on how to stay motivated to work out will help you remaining on track, especially if you do your fitness at home.

3 Simple Tricks

These tricks actually aren’t very complicated. What you need is a better goal you want to steer at than “I want to get fit”, smaller benchmarks on the way and your workout stuff in sight, so it won’t be forgotten:

Hardcore Bonus Trick

If these aren’t enough to keep you on track, here is one that might just do it: Put up a poster of your favorite fitness idol, one where he or she is looking directly at the camera, and where you will look at it very often.

This one goes back to an experiment conducted at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Great Britain, in 1998: Students there had a coffee-room at their disposal where they could fill their cup and then decide how much they wanted to pay for it by voluntarily putting some money in an “honesty box”. A sign above the box explained the system and suggested donation amounts, but often there was a lot less money in the box than what the coffee drunk was worth.

Have you worked out today?

The university’s psychologists came up with a neat way to test social cues for enhancing donations: in addition to the sign, they one week put a picture of a pair of eyes above the box, next week the picture was of some flowers. Then they recorded how much money had been paid in relation to the amount of coffee drunk. The result was that whenever the coffee drinkers felt watched, more money was later in the box (PDF).

If you feel your workout motivation is lacking, a look into the eyes of a fit sports idol you admire might very well help keeping you on track.

Pictures courtesy of “DVIDSHUB” and Ibrahim Iujaz.