A Queer Personal Trainer in Toronto talks Motivation
A Queer Personal Trainer in Toronto says if motivation is the limiting factor, motivation is NOT the issue
So I have a person that I am working with on social media because in order to do this with any frequency I need to be dragged kicking and screaming by someone I am paying (and Zoe is brilliant, also v helpful).
Anyway, one of my prompts this month is what do I tell people who aren’t feeling motivated and she wanted like five lines but instead I’m giving a TED talk because this is an interesting question that I think highlights a deeper issue.
So my first response to what do you do if you aren’t feeling motivated to go to the gym today is, don’t go to the gym then.
A Queer Personal Trainer in Toronto pushes back on pushing through… sort of
But shouldn’t you need to push through and force or cajole yourself? Every so often maybe, but often? Absolutely not. And sometimes, you just need a day (or a week) off.
One of the biggest inhibitors I have found in people who WANT to exercise or exercise more is that they are waiting until they WANT to. I will argue that they ARE motivated. Part of this want to involves a sense of ease. They are waiting until it feels easy to go to the gym.
This day never comes. Not at first at least.
But you (if this IS you) - are motivated. You just might not know it.
Basically everyone comes to me for the same things. More strength, feeling more healthy generally, good habit formation and some degree of body recomposition (lowering body fat and upping muscularity). This is sometimes mixed with job - specific training.
So those are great reasons, motivations we can call them but we need to go deeper. So you wanna exercise. Cool. Why? Make a list. And then for each point you make, ask why. Then ask why to that response. And maybe why again. At some point you will hit a bedrock truth. It’s been there the whole time, it just needed a little unearthing.
You can then ask yourself what happens if I don’t? Or another great prompt is what am I getting out of not doing it?
What you end up with are a list of things that make whether you WANT to go to the gym or not irrelevant. Do I want to go to the gym is seldom the right question to be asking. Do you want to be able to dance for the rest of your life? Yes. Do you want to be able to climb stairs without getting winded? Yes. Then it doesn’t matter whether you want to go to the gym. What matters is that you want to be able to dance. You don’t go to the gym, because you want to go to the gym. You go to the gym because you want to be able to dance.
This is something that any serious athlete has baked into them. Do they want to get up at five and go to practice? Probably not. Do they want to win that championship? Yes they do.
A Queer Personal Trainer in Toronto says find the DEEPER why
And look, for most of us, we maybe just can’t insert exercise seamlessly into our current lifestyle. Like if your eating habits are a little shabby and your sleeping habits aren’t great you have two huge barriers to ever feeling like going to the gym right there. So again, if you want the process to feel a little easier, you probably need to change a few other things around as well. And if you want to like really really workout you absolutely have to have diet and sleep down. It’s critical. Otherwise you are potentially doing more harm than good. Unless your a 20 year old cis dude in which case you have about 10 years to do basically whatever you want.
Once you get going in a gym, which you dragged yourself to with your bedrock motivations in your pocket, after a while you get used to it, you begin to feel different, look a little different. You start to see a pay off. You begin to see how it’s worth it. This lowers the cognitive load around forcing yourself and it gets EASIER. You also hopefully discover something you ENJOY. There are a million different things to do in a gym and I bet one of them you’ll dig. Find that one. My partner really does not historically like exercise (and yes that makes us a bit of an odd couple) but then she discovered that she could eat a gummie and go and get on a bike and she loves it. She currently does a shit load of cardio every week (she wears a mask for safety reasons and also to hide the giant stoner grin on her face).
And the last thing I’ll point out is that most people don’t understand how critical consistency is to whatever their physical goal may be and so think how often they do a thing is significantly more negotiable than it actually is. So let’s be really clear. Consistency trumps EVERYTHING. Read it again. You can have the most optimized program possible and the person next to you doing God knows will see way better results than you if they have rock solid consistency and you don’t.
So figure out why you wanna exercise. Like the really really why(s). And then focus on that. And if you are still struggling ask some hard questions. Do I like what I do in a gym? Am I getting enough sleep? When was the last time I ate a green thing? See barriers as barriers and work to remove them to whatever capacity you can. And then give it some time. Drag yourself to the gym for a bit and be really generous about seeing results (“my mood has been a little lighter this week. I do feel really relaxed after a workout”.) Find what YOU really like doing and dig in a little. And then, when the day comes and you’re a little under slept or it’s just rainy or whatever and you’re just really not feeling it: cool. It’s a snow day. Do something else and come back refreshed and ready to go.