How To Stay Motivated During The Winter Months

With the cold weather outside, the last thing you likely feel like doing is heading out for a workout session.  Likewise, even driving to a local gym may not be all that appealing. Instead, curling up with a blanket by the fire and some hot cocoa may be more your speed.

Make no mistake about it, it can be far more challenging to stay motivated to exercise during the winter months compared to the summer. But, with the right strategy in place, you can stick with fitness throughout this time period and go on to reach any goals that you may have set for yourself.

It’s all about changing your mind frame.  Let’s look at some tips to remember.

Choose Your Activities Wisely

First, make sure that you are selecting your activities wisely. If you are going to be hitting the gym, make absolutely sure that you enjoy the workouts that you are planning. If you don’t, it’ll just be that much harder to hit the gym when you should.

If you aren’t a gym buddy and prefer outdoor exercise, don’t force yourself to go for that run if you don’t want to. Use the winter months to explore other activity forms such as cross country skiing, skating, or even snowshoeing.

Those will also be great workouts and will allow you to have fun at the same time.

Since you can only do these during the winter months, take advantage of that fact right now.

Set New Goals

It’s also a great time to set some new goals. If you’ve been working on the same goal for quite some time, it may be losing steam.  Revamp your workout program.  If fat loss was a priority through the summer months for instance, it might be time to now change over and do a muscle building program.

This will help you transform your body and come spring, you can start moving back toward fat burning once again.

Making sure that you are constantly striving to work towards something that’s important to you is important otherwise it will be hard to get pumped up to put in the effort you need to.

These goals may also involve completing a challenge of sorts such as the push up or squats challenge. If you have a set protocol to follow to reach that goal, it can sometimes give you the extra push you need to move in the right direction.

Learn Something New

Another way to get an instant boost to your fitness motivation?  Try learning something new.  Research up on a new activity o training technique.  Once you’ve gained sufficient information, put it to use in the gym (or wherever you need to go to do that activity).

For some, it might be rock climbing. For others, ballroom dancing.  Start thinking outside the box.  Remember that fitness doesn’t have to take place in the gym.  You can get fit anywhere you choose as long as whatever you are doing gets you moving and involves some element of fitness: muscle endurance, muscles strength, balance and agility, or flexibility.

Mix it up and you’ll be more motivated to stick with it.

Visualize Success

Finally, if you’re really struggling to get motivated and need a little additional push in the right direction, you may want to consider visualizing success.  Lay somewhere quiet and picture yourself having achieved your main goal.

How does it feel?  Live in this moment as best as you possibly can and it can increase your desire to strive for and reach the goals you have set.

In other cases, you may wish instead to visualize the process of reaching those goals. Visualize yourself hitting the gym for your workouts or overcoming any obstacles that stand in your way.

Even though this is just a visualization, at times, it can actually help you improve your motivation and belief that you can achieve success. This can then be enough to give you that motivation to really attack your goals, full force ahead.

So there you have a few of the main ideas to keep in mind this winter season as you try and maintain your fitness program, taking your fitness to a new level.

What secrets do you use to stay motivated during the winter months? Share them with us so that others can benefit as well.