How to Build and Reinforce Sports Habits

Where to begin

Before you start running in the morning or going to the gym, decide for yourself why you will do it, what long-term results you expect to get.

Only by understanding the importance of a new habit will you be able to make regular efforts until the habit starts working for you.

Write down your reasons on a piece of paper. For myself, I have identified seven main benefits in sports:

I will become more energetic both at work / business and in my personal life.
During exercise, endorphins are produced in the body, which stimulate positive emotions, suppress depression and reduce anxiety.
The body is tempered, organs and cells are saturated with oxygen, and immunity is increased.
The muscles get stronger.
Regular physical activity helps you burn extra calories and lose weight.
With the alternation of loads and periods of recovery, the energy resource and endurance in general will increase.
The regularity of classes will make you more disciplined and purposeful.

What is a habit in terms of physiology

The habit formula is as follows:

Habit = Signal-stimulus (trigger) + Behavioral model (pattern) + Positive reinforcement (reward).

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, Nobel Prize laureate in medicine, distinguished between unconditioned reflexes (present from birth) and conditioned (acquired during life). He experimented with dogs and was able to bind the salivation that occurs when food was brought to the dog (unconditioned reflex) to the inclusion of a light bulb (conditioned reflex). When the light (trigger) came on, the dog salivated (pattern) and she received food (reward) for this.

How does this help us reinforce the habit? The mechanisms of habit development and the acquisition of a conditioned reflex are of a common nature. And the main task in the formation of a habit is to turn from irregular actions into a conditioned reflex, which is reproduced easily, almost automatically. Just as Pavlov's dogs salivated when the light bulb was turned on.

I applied this formula to the habit of playing sports, and for me now it looks like this:

Trigger	Pattern	Reward
Daily workout reminder in Todoist (usually 1, 5-2, 5 hours after morning work)	Pack your backpack and go to the gym or, if time is short, put on sports shorts and exercise at home	Delicious Breakfast - I have about 10 breakfast variations on the Trello board, and I choose from them what I want today. On Fridays, this is usually macaroni and cheese - the trigger of the last day of the active work week.

Why you can't exercise regularly

Here is a list of the main mistakes people make when starting to play sports.

Trying to introduce a habit solely with willpower

Unfortunately, willpower is a very limited resource that usually runs out before the habit takes hold.

Taking on too heavy a load

If you come to the gym and a coach offers you an hour program, after which you have difficulty moving your legs, this is a sure way to give up such workouts after a couple of sessions.

Implementing multiple habits at the same time

This is the mistake I've made on a regular basis in the past, trying to develop multiple habits at once. This usually ends with none of them being fixed. Focus and concentration are important factors when introducing a new habit.

You are not interested

People who try to go to the gym will understand me, but they are bored there. You don't have to do something that you don't like to get into a habit of exercising. If it’s boring to pull the iron, go to a group workout, try CrossFit, or go for a run in the park.

Dramatically change your daily routine

If before you didn’t spend an hour and a half a day at the gym, but now you try to go to workout every day, your brain begins to resist strongly, because it is very unusual for it.

To build such a significant habit into your life, take it gradually. For example, start with 5 minutes of exercise in the morning, after two weeks do 10 minutes, after another two weeks add 15-20 minutes of jogging, and so on. This process is perfectly described in Robert Maurer's book Step by Step Towards Achievement.

How to reinforce your exercise habit

Tip 1. Make a lesson plan

It is convenient to make it as cards in the free Google Keep service, and it will always be on your phone, even without access to the Internet.

It is very important that the plan is phased: you do not need to immediately start with intense training, 10 minutes a day is enough for the first weeks.

Tip 2. Add variety

The brighter your workouts, the more fun it will be for you to introduce the habit.

Come up with locations for bad weather: for example, option 1 - charging in the room; option 2 - group workout in the gym; option 3 - swimming pool + exercise bike; option 4 - rocking chair and so on.

For good weather, choose 2-3 parks or other beautiful places to run or exercise.

For more motivation, you can take a photo at each workout and once a week / month make collages of these photos (for example, in Google Photos, they are created in a few clicks).

Tip 3. Prepare in advance

On the weekend, prepare your gym clothes for the week. It is ideal when you have different clothes for different types of activity (for example, at home you train in one T-shirt, in the gym in another, and so on). This will make the brain even more aware of the variety in training.

It is also convenient when there is a special drawer or shelf in the closet for the form, so that you do not waste extra effort remembering where what is.

It is important that the uniform is comfortable and you like the way you look in it: then you will wear it with pleasure every time.

Make a playlist of music to keep you energized while exercising or on a run. Many services, such as Yandex. Music, Google Play Music and others, allow you to collect playlists and listen to them even offline. Or you can just download the songs to your phone and organize them already there. The more motivating tracks you have, the better!

Tip 4: Add physical activity reminders to your calendar

You should plan your workouts in advance and set reminders, then the chances of exercising regularly are significantly increased.

For example, I entered my daily physical activity into the Todoist planner, and it reminds me of this every day. This function is available in all electronic organizers, including Google Calendar, MS Outlook, Evernote and others.

Tip 5. Use the "if - then" method

Often, for objective reasons, it is impossible to get to the gym: for example, the boss decided to hold a planning meeting in the evening, and the group training had to be skipped.

Use your imagination and come up with 2-3 options for how you can add physical activity to your routine in such cases:

after work, get off the metro to the station earlier and walk home to the house;
take a walk with the dog for half an hour more in the evening;
go to the pool and swim, and so on.

It is clear that in terms of load, walking 2 km is not the same as crossfit training, but our task is to consolidate the habit. The type of activity is not critical, because regularity is important.

And if you just don't want to go to the gym today, that's okay - just figure out what you will do instead.

Tip 6. Record your results

First, it will help you see your progress, and second, it will help you perceive the acquisition of a new habit as a game. Your boring task - going to the gym - will turn into an exciting one - go to the "new level" by completing, for example, 20 sessions in a month.

It is convenient to record the results in a table in which the percentage of completed per month is calculated. You can highlight the cells in colors depending on the type of activity: I mark days with intensive training in green, and light training in yellow.

Transfer the results for the month to the table with the results for the year. Then you will have a specific goal - this year to be better than last. You can also set goals by month so that, for example, March of the current year is more productive in terms of sports than March of the past.

Here is an example of my table with 2018 totals. Over the course of the year, I completed my training plan by 77% (159 out of 264 workouts planned). I consider this a good result, since last year there were a lot of flights for work, and on trips you often get out of schedule.

And here is my table for 2019, and the year started off with a bang: the results in January 2019 were significantly better than in January 2018.

By keeping such a table, you will turn physical activity into an interesting game, a competition where you compete with yourself to be better tomorrow than yesterday.

Tip 7. Come up with a reward for yourself

For example, it could be a delicious after-workout dinner or going to the movies if you have completed your weekly lesson plan.

The reward shouldn't be substantial, but it should be regular (every time you follow the pattern of a new habit). It is in this case that the habit will be strengthened most effectively.

How long does it take to establish a habit

Plastic surgeon Maxwell Moltz, in his excellent book Psychocybernetics, writes that his patients take an average of 21 days to get used to their new appearance. That is, the formation of a conditioned reflex - not to be surprised, seeing yourself in the mirror with a changed face - is a habit.

But depending on the habit, you may need from one to three months to establish it. Of course, the longer you stick with it, the more the force of the habit will help you in the future.

Habit is a wonderful tool with which we can radically change our lives. The difficulty is that habits are introduced gradually and for their formation you need to follow basic rules, for example, the principle of "trigger - pattern - reward". But once the habit is established, it will be easy for you to follow it.

If you want to live an interesting, vibrant and fulfilling life, you need to form the right habits. This is perhaps the most important thought that I wanted to express in the article.