Commitment. Com-mit-ment.
One of those words people hear and go New number – Who Dis?
It’s daunting – I get it. Doesn’t matter which aspect of your life you’re putting that word to, it can get intimidating real quick. But the aspect of life I’m tackling this word to is WORKOUT COMMITMENT. Yah the big one.
The El Jefe.
The every year’s New Year’s Resolution.
The at least one a day Pinterest scroll.
The Imma gonna start Monday.
The I only need to do three months to see change.
The Big Enchilada.
You get it.
So how do we manage this word? How can we bring it into our lives and love it and nurture it and cuddle it close as one does a puppy? This is what I call the Holy Crap what is my life dilemma. And on the wild ride of Holy Crap what is my life the train most definitely runs off its rails a few good many times and it takes a whole demolition crew to right that baby up and put it back on its tracks. By that point a ton of time passes we wonder where the heck our workout commitment schedule went to, and the train slowly starts moving down the same ol’track of fall back bad behaviors that mainly start with the saying Monday for sure.
Gotta love those mystical, magical moments of beginnings we call Monday’s.
In this dilemma of always managing to start strong for a solid three weeks before something happens to throw my game off, I sat myself down and decided that I was allowing the excuses to pile up and prevent the change I wanted to see in myself. One of the big problems of workout commitment is if you don’t actually slap yourself in the face and say enough is enough, then nothing changes. I’ve told myself multiple times: ya gotta stop drinking, you need to get into a workout schedule, stop eating those tortilla chips, etc., etc., etc., but I didn’t actively try and stop or start any of those things. I just kept telling them to myself while pinching my muffin top and staring at my expanding waistline in the bathroom mirror.
You NEED to have that enough is enough conversation with yourself. NEED to say to yourself, I’m sick of these excuses allowing me to slide through life instead of owning up. And I know that everyone is always saying that you don’t see change unless you really want it, mean it, decide it’s enough, and I know this is a stupid reiteration, but it’s true. So incredibly true. You need to have your come to Jesus moment and to quote Nike JUST DO IT!
In this moment of owning my sh*t, I sat down and thought how would I actually commit to a workout/less booze schedule. Tackling the booze question is something for another time, because for me personally, limiting my wine drinking is a lot harder than committing myself to a workout schedule. So going back to keeping track of my daily workout routine – I decided ‘let’s create a motivational board.’ And thus I went to the holy grail of motivational quotes and images (aka Pinterest), and printed off pretty much every Gymaholic picture I loved and taped it to a construction board and then I took those mini post-it tabs and wrote out the days from that weekend all the way until my next planned vacation – turned out to be around 160+ tabs.
So I create this beautiful masterpiece of a motivational board and shove it right next to my newly bought Peloton bike, and tell myself ‘each tab is a day of working out – challenge: attempt to remove as many tabs as possible until the Grand Caymans.’ And thus, every time I do a workout, I remove a tab from my motivational board and watch in sweet rapture as the empty spaces around the board grow larger, and the number of tabs grow smaller. Let me tell you, it is incredibly motivating to see those suckers disappear into your bathroom garbage.
(I keep the tabs on the board when I miss a workout to keep things in perspective for myself and to see if I am starting to slack way too much on the non-working out thing)
I have found this to be the best way to keep on top of my workouts – I see it every morning when I wake up, I have to walk past it to get to my bathroom, the colors draw my eye when I first step into my bedroom, I stare at it randomly when doing my spin classes to help me push harder, and the satisfaction of ripping those tabs off makes me want to do a workout just so I can say, ‘so long sucka.’
If you’re trying to find a way to keep on top, take a leaf out of my book and create the motivational tab motherboard. But before you even get to this step, have your come to Jesus talk. Let me know how it goes!