10 tips to help stay motivated

As a personal trainer, above everything else I need to be able to motivate my clients. I could prescribe the most effective training programs and be the best technique coach available, but if I cannot motivate people to turn up to training consistently then my training programs and my coaching skills are both wasted. We all lose motivation at one stage or another. Unfortunately, a small drop in motivation can result in a big step backwards. I would like to introduce 10 tips that I apply as a personal trainer to help motivate the people I train.

1. Set your goal

We all know it, we just sometimes forget to do it - you have to set a goal. Goals need to be SMART goals to maximise there effectiveness as a motivational tool. SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time orientated. Take the time to sit down and plan your goal, don't just decide it suddenly. It takes some serious thinking to set SMART goals properly.

2. Constantly develop new sub goals / challenges

It is important to have goals within goals to keep training interesting and moving in the right direction. Training can become monotonous and you may begin to feel discouraged if you are continually aiming for a long term goal. Set yourself up for some mini victories along the way by achieving sub goals that are beneficial to achieving your overall goal. For example, if your goal is to lose weight or improve your general fitness, set a goal to complete a 10km fun run or a 30km fundraiser walk. Although completing these events may have never been your initial goal, training for these events will help you achieve it. Setting these sub goals or challenges as part of your training will help to keep training fresh and exciting and give you the opportunity to achieve success along the way to reaching your ultimate goal. Sub goals could be anything at all - if it keeps you motivated to continue training, then the sub goal has served its purpose.

3. Make yourself accountable to someone

There is no point in having a great goal if there is no one to hold you accountable. Even the most motivated athletes need to have a coach to help them continue to train. Choose someone you are comfortable discussing your goal with and tell them what your goal is, when and how you will achieve it. Give this person permission to ask about your goal or even set a time each week when it has to be discussed. Being held accountable to your goal will help motivate you to continue training.

4. Understand your motivation

We have already discussed that having a goal is important for staying motivated but you need to understand your initial motivation for wanting to achieve in the first place. Make sure you ask yourself why, why and why again! Make the goal yours, make it personal. Understanding the reason behind your goal is crucial for ongoing motivation to train. For example, it is not simply enough to say "I want to lose weight". Go one step further, why do you want to lose weight? Is it because you don't want your friends to think you look fat? Is it because you want to fit into a size smaller pair of jeans? It is because you need to lower your risk of heart disease or diabetes? Understanding the reason behind your goal gives you something to look back at and remind yourself of why you are training. You may not always be as pumped up and excited about achieving your goal as the day you first set it, but if you really understand why you need to achieve it you can use this as your ongoing motivator.

5. Avoid injury and illness

There is nothing worse than injury or illness when you are trying to stay motivated with your training. I understand that a lot of the time injury and illness is out of our control, but it's important that we do everything we can to keep injury and illness free. Training with correct technique and planning, dieting sensibly and focusing on recovery will all help to avoid the pitfalls of exercise related injuries. Training and dieting intelligently may at first appear to be a slower approach to achieving your goals but it will bring about a more sustainable solution in the long term.

6. Monitor your progress

You need to have a system in place to monitor your goals and the effectiveness of your training. Realising you are moving either closer towards or further away from achieving your goal is a helpful motivator. An effective measuring tool could be as simple as the amount of weight lifted on a particular exercise, dress size, waist circumference or weight on the scales. You don't have to use complicated measuring data for this to be effective - in fact the simpler, easier to measure options are often the best.

7. Establish rewards for success

When you reach your goal or sub goal make sure you congratulate yourself. Often the satisfaction of achieving something very important to you will be sufficient reward enough, however allow yourself something special. This might be eating or drinking something you would normally restrict, buying yourself a new gym outfit or pair of runners, anything really. Decide in advance what your reward is going to be so you can use it to motivate yourself by looking forward to the prize.

8. Establish consequences for failure

Not everyone will agree with this one, but I think it is important to establish consequences for not achieving your goals or for falling off track. After all, if we are going to reward ourselves for success, there needs to be two sides to this. For example, If you have set a goal to train 3 times per week but you only trained twice or you set a goal to lose 1 kg a week but you didn't lose any, there needs to be a consequence for this. I'm not suggesting anything drastic but perhaps you will deny yourself the after work drinks on the Friday night or the sweet treat on the weekend. Your consequence could be anything at all, as long as you are prepared to follow through with it and it motivates you to train to avoid it. Decide your consequence in advance so you can remind yourself about it. 

9. Mix things up

The more interesting you can make your training, the more likely you are to continue with it. There is nothing worse for motivation then turning up to training only to do the same thing every time. You can mix up your training by changing up exercises and exercise orders, using different types and a wide range of equipment and alternating rep and set ranges. You can even try training with a friend or a group of friends. The more variety you try, the more likely you are to stumble across a few options you enjoy.

10. Don't let small set backs stop you

Despite your best efforts you will encounter small set backs during your training. Set backs come in many forms including: missing training sessions, eating foods that you shouldn't have or eating too much, not meeting short term goals or suffering an injury. It is important that small set backs are prevented from turning into major problems. If you miss three training sessions, don't let it stop you, get straight back into it and don't miss four. If you had a bad lunch, don't let it turn into a bad dinner too. Cut off the set backs immediately and don't let them snowball into something that is too big to undo.

I hope these 10 tips help you to stay motivated with your training. You will find that some of these work for you and others don't - motivation is not 'one size fits all' and your main motivator will continue to change throughout the duration of your training program. As long as you find the right thing at the right time to keep you training and moving forward - it doesn't matter what it is. If you have any tips of your own I would love to hear them, and I'm sure everyone else would too.