We spent last month learning about how to set goals. Now it’s time to get real on doing what we’ve set out to do. Two handy tools for staying motivated are the minimum and the maximum.
The minimum is the tool we use on days when we just don’t want to do anything. We set the minimum on a day when we are neither unreasonably low-energy nor unreasonably optimistic so that it is more likely to be both doable and enough. If, say, we have cardio goals, our minimum might be a 30-minute walk, or a trip around the block twice during the day. We want the minimum to be easy. Depending on where we are in our fitness journey, that minimum might be a five minute commitment.
On the other end of the spectrum, we prevent burnout by setting maximums. Some of us who want to do All the Things just keep piling more stuff into the workouts. We do cardio and then weights and then some yoga and then there’s this really good class and our friends want to play pickleball and maybe it would be nice to go for a swim and we just totally overdo ourselves. Unless we are specifically training for an endurance event, we do not need to be spending two hours working out. Those of us coming from the couch might want to set the maximum at one kind of workout, plus a little stretching.
We can do this in the happy middle.
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