How to Make Exercise a Habit

Let’s face it – we all know that regular exercise is good for us. Despite this being widely accepted and understood, many of us are still not exercising on a regular basis. Coming from someone who has spent their life staying active through sports and training in the gym, even I have gone through periods of my life where I did not exercise regularly. But, I have recently been able to maintain a very consistent schedule, and it is all because I focused on building a habit first. In this article I will outline the steps I took to make exercise a habit.

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How do habits work?

I have done a fair amount of research into habits. I have known for a long time that I need routines. If I know that I can fit a certain set of activities into my day between the hours of 6AM and 8AM, then I will always do those activities.

When I worked as a personal trainer, I typically started my work day around 10 or 11AM. So that meant waking up at 4AM to catch the bus out to my gym (a 45 minute bus ride), workout for 1.5hrs, bus home, shower, eat and walk to work (45 minute walk). I could have stayed up late, gone out all weekend, and eaten horribly, and I would always follow this same routine.

And even though that may sound like an extreme schedule to keep, it was incredibly easy because I had built a habit.

James Clear, who wrote the famous book, “Atomic Habits“, outlines the 4 stages of a habit loop as the following:

• Cue: cues can be emotional, physical, a sound, a person, or something in your environment that kick-off the sequence of events in your brain that lead to the habit actions. Your night-time routine could be cued by you starting to brush your teeth, which then leads you to wash your face, put on your night cream, tie up your hair, and go to bed. All this happening without you having to put much thought or effort into it. One minute you’re brushing your teeth, the next you’re in bed.
• Craving: this is your motivation to do the habit. It isn’t necessarily craving like someone would crave a chocolate bar, it is actually craving the change of state that the habit will create. In the example above, brushing your teeth then leads to the change in state from wake-time to bed-time. Sleep is something we all know is inherently important to our lives, so this is why it is a great motivator.
• Response: this is the actual habit. So whether it is your night-time routine, or getting to the gym for your workout, this is what we are trying to develop and nurture by understanding how habits works.
• Reward: this is the immediate benefit you feel from the habit action. In the nighttime routine example, the reward is knowing that you have fresh breath, clean skin, and will get a good night’s rest, making you more presentable and acceptable to people tomorrow (social rewards are incredibly valuable).

If you understand the different opportunities to build in cues, or triggers, into your day, you can set in motion any good habit you want! This is also why personal trainers and coaches will always ask you what your motivation is for training, as this will help reinforce the craving and rewards aspect of habit formation.

Start Small to Stay Consistent

I am sure you are already thinking about how you can create cues to help you get into the exercise habit you’ve been wanting to create in your life. It is incredibly tempting to see the big goal of working out 5-days per week and running an hour every day, and thinking that with this habit loop, that can be achieved tomorrow.

Although I respect your ambition, going for gold right away can actually lead to faster relapse because of how much will power it takes. In Christine Carter’s book, The Sweet Spot, she talks about 2 important concepts: will power and minimum effective dose.

Will power is a finite resource. Psychologist has found that people only have so much will-power in a given day. The more we exercise our will-power, the less we will have. So if you are looking to change your eating habits and you want to eat less sugar, to try and go cold turkey and have zero sugar in your diet will use up a lot of your will power, so you may not be able to resist other temptations throughout the day.

Minimum effective dose is actually a term seen most commonly in the medical field. This is the minimum dose that is required to result in the desired effect. This applies to your habits as well. You want to find the smallest action that you can repeat on a consistent basis in order to get the desired effect of building a habit.

When you combine these two concepts, you can see how starting small is the key to building a lasting habit. In The Sweet Spot, the author talks about how she started with a 30s habit. She wanted to meditate, so she started with her cue (her alarm going off), understood her motivation, and therefore had a craving, responded with 30s of meditating, and then experienced her reward. Starting with 30s may have seemed ridiculous, but she shared that because it was so ridiculously short, there would be days where she would meditate for longer, and some where she’d only meditate for 30s, but because the goal was just 30s, she was never disappointed and it never felt like a chore. It was so easy she couldn’t not meditate.

In my life, I found I was trying to recreate my habit from when I was a personal trainer but in my current life, where I work a standard 9-5 and don’t have physical activity baked into my career.

So, I decided I would wake up at 5AM and just walk around the block and doing 3 exercises when I got home. The sound of Steve Angello’s “Rejoice” is my alarm and my cue. The craving is my motivation to build a healthy habit, so I can get back into the shape and mental state I had before. My response was to get into my workout clothing, put on my weighted vest, and head outside for my walk.

Walking around the block is the minimum dose for me. I walk dogs as a side gig and going on walks that are 45mins or more is common practice for me. But in this scenario, what I wanted to do was build the habits of getting dressed and heading outside for a walk. Some days felt ridiculous, but there were also days where it felt like I woke up on the wrong side of the bed.

On the days where I mentally felt off, I was still able to get out for that walk and do my 3 exercises. In the past, if I woke up feeling tired or mentally/emotionally off, I would turn off the lights and go to bed. The prospect of having to go all the way to the gym and try to power through a big workout felt like too much. Whereas now, even though my fitness goals are not progressing as quickly as they would if I was at the gym, the potential for me to get back to those training intensities is much higher because it is becoming a habit to be up and active every morning.

And it all starts with a walk around the block and 3 exercises.

Squashing the 21-day Myth

Before I wrap this up, I think it is important to squash a common myth around habits. Many people like to say that it takes 21 days to make a new habit. This is actually from a book in the 1960’s where a doctor found it took, on average, about 21 days for patients to get used to their new appearance after plastic surgery.

This theory is more about acclimatizing to something new, than it is about building new pathways in your brain.

A study in 2018 found that it actually took an average of 66 days for participants to make 1 of 3 new activities a habit. That’s just over 3 months to build up 1 new habit, and is also an average.

I think it is important to mention this because setting realistic expectations is crucial. I don’t want you going into this thinking you’ll be an exercising all-star in 3 weeks, only to be disappointed when you don’t feel like it is sticking just yet. Set yourself for success by setting realistic expectations.

The response, or the exercise you do may evolve over time, but the actual habit you are building – the pursuit of making something so easy that you don’t even have to think about it – will take time. So give yourself time and you’ll find the process much more enjoyable.

How to Make Exercise a Lasting Habit

Now that you understand how the habit loop works and how to approach starting a new habit, I want you to follow the following exercise to start building our new exercise habit.

1. Find your motivation: Why do you want to start exercising? I want you to really dig deep here. There are no wrong answers, and if you think your motivation is vain or superficial – it isn’t. It is OK to want to like the way you look because confidence and self-esteem are so important to overall health and especially to mental health. I want you to love and accept your body today, but I also believe that pursuing a fitness goal is a great way to show your body that you love it because you want to keep it in good shape.
2. Think of your minimum effective dose: you know that you want to exercise, but what is the smallest thing you could do every day to start building the habit of exercise into your day? Are you waking up and doing 10 squats? Are you walking around the block on your lunch break? Are you doing 10 jumping jacks after work? Whatever you think would be an easy, small thing that you can fit into your day to build the habit of regular exercise, make that your minimum effective dose.
3. Choose your cue/trigger: If you are working out in the morning, what is the alarm or the thing that will trigger the sequence of events leading to your minimum effective dose exercise? At lunch, maybe you have a reminder on your phone, or you always grab a glass of water. After work could be the action of closing your laptop or putting your keys in a specific spot. Try to find a cue that already exists in your life or is something you enjoy so that the resulting habit is easy.
4. Make a plan to start tomorrow: while your motivation is high, plan to start creating your new habit tomorrow. Taking advantage of this high sense of motivation and drive will make the first few days easier. There will be an adjustment period, but with the right minimum effective dose exercise, you’ll find yourself starting to crave an evolution of the exercise. After a few weeks your walk around the block may turn into a 15 minute run or a walk to the gym. And after a few months you won’t even have to think about getting yourself up and moving because your mind and body will already be craving that next workout.

Let me know if you have found other helpful habit-forming tricks. This is such an interesting and important element of health and wellbeing, so I am always on the lookout for new ways to make habits.