How to Stay Consistent With Working Out (When Life Gets Heavy)

This morning I woke up with ten things pulling me in ten directions. I was stressed before my feet hit the floor. And I still got to the gym.

Not because I felt like it. I want to be clear about that, because the whole thing most people believe about consistency is wrong, and it keeps them stuck. Showing up for yourself when life gets heavy is a skill. You can learn it. I did, and I'm going to show you exactly how I do it.

Motivation is a myth

Here's the lie: "To be consistent, I have to feel motivated. I have to want to go."

If that were true, nobody would ever have a body they were proud of, because nobody feels like it most days. I've trained through some of the craziest circumstances of my life, and I'm not saying go create chaos where there's peace. I'm saying this: whatever cards you were dealt, own them. Accept that this is your starting point. So what if you don't like it? If you're walking in a direction, that's why you're walking in that direction.

Consistency runs on something else, and it isn't a feeling. It's a decision you made earlier, plus a few habits that carry you on the days the feeling is gone.

Match the plan to the season you're in

First, let's be honest about what consistency even looks like. Everyone says "I need to go six or seven times a week." If you can, do it. But if the season of your life right now is telling you that you can only train twice a week, stop fighting it. That's the reality, and beating yourself up because you weren't there the other five days just drains the two days you do have.

Here's what to do with your two days instead. Walk in with intention. Train like you're going to war. Use that hour. You don't have to hit every muscle group, but the ones you train, you had better feel them. If it's hot yoga, come out dripping. If it's spin, same thing. If it's the weights, make the faces. That's a marker of success.

Two workouts a week, fully used, beat six half-hearted ones.

And for the record, the Canadian movement guidelines ask adults for about 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity a week plus muscle-strengthening work at least twice a week, and they say plainly that progress toward the target brings benefits even before you reach it. Two real sessions is a real start. (CSEP)

The heavy days: you're listening to the wrong thing

There are going to be days when you go in and your mind just isn't right. You're sad, you're exhausted, you had a long day, and a voice says, "but she said maximize my workout time, and I can't."

You're listening to the wrong thing. You're listening to your thoughts, and on heavy days your thoughts talk big. So put your headphones in. That's why everyone wears them at the gym. And don't listen to what you listen to every other day of your life. That's the last thing you want in your ears.

Have a playlist that exists only for your workout, nowhere else in your life. That way the first song flips a switch. They did it with the dogs; do it with yourself. If you are your best asset, train it. Go dog mode: I'm at the gym, I'm amped, I'm about to lift a car, and I'm going to do this twice a week. That's the level.

Decide before the day decides for you

The clock has no mercy on anyone. I've asked it to slow down. It said no. So I back myself into a corner on purpose: I set my goal for the week first, then I look at the days, and I get strategic about where the sessions go.

This isn't white-knuckling. It's thinking. Your workout should already be planned, like an appointment. Do you sit around wondering whether you feel motivated to go to the dentist appointment you booked three months ago? No. It's in your calendar. You show up. That's the logic. You make appointments with yourself, you hold them, you set a minimum, and you keep it.

It's so simple it's annoying. The hard part is putting it into action, which is exactly why a planned week beats a hopeful one.

Emotions still come. Train anyway.

I have done more than one workout with tears streaming down my face. No shame. I'm there, I'm doing my workout, and I don't care that I'm in a bad mood. I'm going to cry through it. I have enough going on in my life; if I'm going to cry, I'm going to cry while doing the right thing.

That's it. That's the whole rule. The mood doesn't get a vote on whether you show up. It only gets a vote on the playlist.

Chess, not checkers

Now let's debunk something that gets said online a lot: "Never miss a day."

I get where it comes from. I understand the logic. But we're playing chess, not checkers. I'm playing to be in my forties still going to the gym with the plan I have now. A lot of people aren't thinking with that logic, and there are two reasons you should.

One: muscle is health insurance. In a large study of older adults, the people with the most muscle for their height had a significantly lower risk of dying over the follow-up years than the people with the least. It was an observational study, so it can't prove cause, but the pattern is consistent across the research: you want something in your routine that actually grows muscle, and that you can keep doing for the long term. (Srikanthan & Karlamangla, 2014)

Two: hold your word to yourself. Set an expectation you can keep. "I'll never miss a day" is a promise you'll break the first week something happens in your life, and something always happens. "I won't miss two days in a row" is a promise you can keep. I've been training since before I had my licence, and the reason it's still here is that in every season I'm realistic with myself. I'm not trying to keep it for the next 90 days. I'm trying to keep it for a lifetime.

You're playing an infinite game

When you build a routine for food, when you build a routine for working out, you're building something for life. You're making a life commitment. You can have seasons where you're more intense. But the question underneath should always be: how can I love this thing at whatever capacity I have right now, and keep it for the rest of my life?

Because what you actually want is not the body that feels good for a year or two, and then you fall off and crash. What you want is to be building someone you'll love in ten years, love even more in twenty, and even more in thirty. It all starts with your habits, and habits take time: in the best-known study on it, a new daily behaviour took a median of about 66 days to become automatic, with a wide range between people. The "21 days" number you've heard has no research behind it. (Gardner, Lally & Wardle, 2012)

An infinite game has no finish line, so there's no "winning." The only way to win is to stay in it as long as possible, while people around you keep getting booted out. Every January a fresh group of gym babies shows up. By spring, most of them are gone. The ones who make it are the ones who became independent, who didn't need a workout partner to stay, who weren't going to let someone else falling off be the reason they hate their life in thirty years.

Build it around your real life

I've given you a lot here, and honestly I have more. But if you want to sit down with me and build a plan that works with your actual life, so you become the kind of person who just does this on the regular instead of trying something and never really getting it to stick, that's exactly what a Body Blueprint is.

Four pictures, your health history, what a day in your life really looks like. Then we build eight weeks around that, designed for your body, so you can see it working. No cookie cutter. Men and women. You walk in with a plan that was made for your life, and you stop starting over.