Submitted by journey gym on Fri, 01/01/2010
We love this article and the blog it is from. Please visit Zen Habits if you enjoy this article as their blog is chock-full of articles about productivity and self-improvement. Recently my friend and fellow blogger Scott Young did a great post entitled, “New to exercise? Make workouts daily“ as it was an excellent post, and perfectly timed as it mirrors my own recent efforts at making exercise a daily habit.
The problem with trying to make exercise a habit, and it’s something that we’ve all faced, is that you usually try to exercise 3 or 4 times a week…and that makes creating a new exercise habit difficult. The reason is that the more consistent an action is, the more likely it is to be a habit.
Therefore, as Scott points out, and it’s something I fully agree with, exercising every day is more likely to result in a habit — something that becomes almost automatic, and much easier, instead of a constant struggle.
I’ve been implementing this idea in my daily life recently, alternating every day between different exercises: running, swimming, biking and strength workouts, as a way of reaching my goal of completing an Olympic-distance triathlon this year. I’m going to continue this habit change into the month of May. I made daily running a habit last year, when I was training for my first marathon, but this year I stopped when I got sick, so I’m re-starting the habit.
