Why is it so hard to do those things that you know you need to do? So hard in fact, that you don’t do them, whilst wanting to get them done! It’s a total quandary! For me those things are stretching / mobility and abdominal calisthenic exercises (sit ups, flutter kicks, leg raises etc). Stretching is really easy, I just open the “leap fitness: stretching exercise” app, the one I downloaded for free ages ago, and follow one of the workouts! Or tune into “Yoga with Adrienne” for one of her videos on YouTube, the ones I have book marked. For the abs, or gut, exercises I have a list of exercises to do.

Again, rather annoyingly, I know the answer, I know the answer because James Clear, in his book Atomic Habits, gave me the answer.

He relates the story of a group of people who needed to do physical exercise. The group was then split into three.

Group one was just told what they needed to do.

Group two was told what they needed to do and given motivational material.

Group three was told what they needed to do but “[T]hey were also asked to formulate a plan for when and where they would exercise over the following week. Specifically, each member of the third group completed the following sentence: “During the next week, I will partake in at least 20 minutes of vigorous exercise on [DAY] at [TIME] in [PLACE].” (Atomic Habits p69)

Here’s where it gets really interesting, the success rate of group one was 35%, group two was 38%, and group three was 91%. This emphasises that the greatest form of self-discipline is being self-organised!

But the motivational group also stood out, I couldn’t help wondering is motivational material only helpful to those who are already motivated. For example I’ll sometimes watch David Goggins videos on the treadmill, not to get on the treadmill. The motivation is to keep going, not to get going. It’s like this blog, I started writing because I’d started training, not because I wanted to start!

I simply need to get back to writing down a sentence naming the day, time, and place of what I need to do!