How To Tap Into Your “Why” For Regular Motivation

Knowing your why can be a great source of motivation, but a lot of athletes who have been pursuing fitness goals for long periods of time forget the reasons they started in the first place.

People who are unable to recognise their true motivations often end up losing the enjoyment and love for the process, and give up completely.

Of course, you can’t choose to be motivated 100% of the time and we’ve all experienced feelings of wanting to skip a session.

But luckily, there are some useful tricks you can use to tap into the motivations that drive you.

This will help you stay consistent for longer so you can reap bigger gains over time.

How To Find Your Why

The fastest way to identify your true reason for training is to remember why it was you started in the first place.

Fitness becomes a lifestyle as much as a hobby and a passion, and with training regularly it’s easy to forget why you fell in love with sport.

For most of us, that reason was that we just had fun. Whether it was the process of making improvements, working out with like-minded people or just spending an hour or so each day forgetting about other problems, there was something about it that made us happy.

If you reflect on what it is about your training that gives you energy - what it is that gets you enthusiastic enjoying what you’re doing - that’s usually a good indication of your true “why”.

How To Use Your Why For Motivation

Identifying what your true reasons for training are is the first step. But after you’ve made it clear in your mind what really motivates you, you’ll probably become disconnected from it in a few weeks, days or hours.

That’s completely normal. It’s just the way the human brain works, and unfortunately we can’t stay in the perfect frame of mind all of the time.

What you can do is remind yourself of your reasons for training so that you can bring that enthusiasm back.

A good trick for doing that is to write your motivations down. Then, keep them somewhere safe like in your bed-side drawer or in your wallet or purse so you can reflect on them regularly.

Another method is to pin them up somewhere you’ll see them each day.

By doing this, you can stay connected to your why and make yourself motivated to train even when you don’t want to.