Just three easy payments!

Let’s imagine you have a meeting planned with an architect about designing your dream home. When you arrange the meeting the architect gives you one piece of home work to do before you meet: you need to write down descriptive words around how you want to feel when you are living in your lovely new home.  You sit down with a piece of paper and let your imagination run free. Words start flowing; comfort, cosy, homely, relaxing, creates connection when entertaining, welcoming, modern and so on. For most of us I imagine our lists would be similar, but there is one word that I can almost guarantee wouldn’t be on 99% of lists. That word is motivating.  

I’m sure a few of you reading this will have some exercise equipment in your home. It seemed like a great idea when you bought it, hey the infomercial promised ‘in seven minutes a day you’ll be able to get great abs and you can do this from the comfort of your own home!’. You paid for this in just three easy payments but this was way too much money for a promise that was broken from the very start. I don’t doubt that most of the home based exercise equipment will work but there’s one major problem - homes aren’t designed to motivate you. If anything they are designed to do the complete opposite.

Some people can be motivated to exercise at home but for the majority this just isn’t a good plan. The reason I think there is so much unused exercise equipment in homes is that at some stage we wanted to create change in our body and we thought the equipment would give us the motivation, but this didn’t end up being the case.

Instead of buying the equipment to get motivated a better plan is to try and find environments that are designed to motivate people in exercise. These could be sports clubs, gyms, running groups, dance classes and so on. Everything about these places is designed to motivate you, to make you be successful with exercise. 

So next time you are tempted to pick up that phone and get a deal on some ‘ab over-promising  machine’, stop and use this as a trigger to focus your energy on finding alternative motivational environments where you can thrive with exercise.  

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