3 Tips for Getting (and Staying) Fit
Views - MIT Technology Review 2016-07-14
Here at ProfHacker we’ve published many posts over the years under the category “Wellness,” which covers a broad range of specific topics from balancing work responsibilities with summer fun to strategies for ensuring you have a good lunch to improving your sleep to which earbuds to wear while swimming.
An important part of wellness is being able to get some exercise, hopefully on a regular basis. Now that we’ve reached the hot summer months here in South Carolina, I’m reminded of how difficult it can be to maintain any sort of workout schedule. Of course, there are many ways to get (and keep) yourself active, but here are 3 that I’ve relied on over the last few years:
Exercise with friends. Add a social element to your fitness habit by finding people you know who also want to work out. Not only does this make your workout more enjoyable, it also makes you accountable to someone other than yourself. The times that I’ve had regular exercise partners — and a shared exercise schedule — have been the times when I’ve maintained the longest uninterrupted streaks of being active.
Keep track of your workouts. You might find it motivating to maintain a log of your workouts and your progress. (I certainly do.) Doing so will allow you to see how much you’ve accomplished over a period of time and also to see how much you’ve improved. You can keep track with pen and paper, obviously, but there are also a great many digital health and fitness tracking tools to choose from.
Sign up for an event. If you register for a race you’ll have given yourself a reason to keep up with your routine. Active.com is a good site to consult to find an event near you, but it’s by no means the only one out there. Once you have an event in your calendar, you can find a training plan that you like, which will provide some structure to your workouts.
These are some of the things that have worked for me. How about you? What strategies have you used to keep up with your exercise routine? Please share in the comments.