Even the fittest of people can fall out of love with exercise.
In fact, a couple of years ago, top personal trainer Nicola Addison – who’s trained Elle Macpherson, Daisy Lowe and Erin O’Connor – didn’t train for a year.
She says there are many types of motivation, but two of the major ones are intrinsic and extrinsic:
- Intrinsic motivation is the self-desire, the ability to self motivate.
- Extrinsic motivation comes from influences outside of the individual.
“I had fully ran out of intrinsic motivation,” Addison explains. “I knew myself well enough to know that. So I turned to the help of one of my trainers, Luis, to motivate me.”
Sometimes you just get bored of your exercise regime, you might plateau in your progress, and making yourself do something you really don’t want to do is incredibly hard.
It happened to me. At uni, I would go to the gym a few times a week, take dance classes and swim. But then I moved to London, started working, life got in the way and I told myself I could neither afford to exercise (be that joining a gym or taking classes) nor find the time.
Excuses, really. But it meant I’d completely fallen out of love with exercise. I didn’t like that fact, and I’d done sporadic workouts or classes in a bid to kickstart my fitness but had never got anywhere.
Slogging it out on the treadmill for 40 minutes just wasn’t fun – and wasn’t really making any difference to my fitness.
But it turns out I was doing completely the wrong thing.
It’s not in the slightest bit new that resistance training and weights are the key to getting fit, but when you want to shift the pounds, it’s hard to shake the idea that you need to do cardio, as that’s what was drilled into us all for years.
Plus, running on a treadmill for however long is easy as you don’t have to think – working out with weights and scary-looking machines means you have to know what you’re doing and plan your workout.
The thing is, just doing cardio isn’t very effective if you want to burn fat – you need to build muscle to boost your basal metabolic rate. And by doing that, you’ll burn more fat over the course of the day.