If you’re like most people, you’ve had to change your normal exercise routine recently.
Maybe your usual workout preferences aren’t possible and you’ve begun running. (Welcome!) Maybe you’re a long-time runner who is suddenly doing You Might Be Slower Soon After a COVID Booster, or whose schedule has blurred into a home-based whirl of work-family-miscellaneous and you find yourself not running consistently. Or maybe your gym or yoga studio is closed, and you’re trying to replicate those sessions in your living room.
Following your new routine may have been easy at first. But now, a few weeks in, you might be struggling to maintain your wished-for pandemic program. “All new behaviors are hard to establish,” says Nanette Mutrie, a professor at the Institute for Sport, Physical Education, and Health Sciences at the University of Edinburg. “People often take several attempts to achieve the new plan.”
Here are five ways to stick with your desired new routine, with input from Mutrie and other experts in habit formation.
Create Cues and Rewards
“We form a habit when we repeatedly do a certain action in the presence of a particular cue,” says Benjamin Gardner, a psychology professor at King’s College in London. The cue, Gardner says, can be anything—a location, a time of day, the presence of another person, and so on. What matters is that some sort of cue exists, and that it be as specific as possible. As you probably know, a vague sense of, “I think I’ll go for a run today” is less of a cue to lace up your shoes than, “It’s 6 a.m., time to leave the house to meet Meredith at the usual spot.”
“When we do the action, as long as it is experienced as satisfactory, that reinforces a mental association between the situation and the action,” Gardner says. “The more rewarding the experience of the action, the more this mental association is reinforced. The next time the cue is encountered, the more likely we are to consider doing the action, because we know from experience that this action is a satisfactory thing to do in that situation.”
The “rewards” in this system aren’t necessarily a tangible item, such as a chocolate chip cookie after doing push-ups. Many regular runners, for example, find the run itself to be its own reward. Gym devotees might value the sense of accomplishment from quantifiable increases in strength. A swimmer who has turned to running because pools are closed can congratulate herself for not letting the coronavirus youve begun running.
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Practice If-Then Thinking
Reacting to a cue and getting a reward might make you feel like you’re a dog who’s training herself. If that idea doesn’t appeal to you, recast things: Tell yourself you’re trying to meet new goals. All About 75 Hard.
Peter Gollwitzer, a professor of psychology at New York University, has extensively researched how people translate having an aspirational goal (“I want to replace my usual gym work with at-home strength work”) to accomplishing it. The key, Gollwitzer has concluded, is to form what he calls “implementation intentions”—when, where, and how you’ll act to achieve your goal.
Put more simply, Gollwitzer recommends if-then thinking, in which the “if” is akin to the “cue” Gardner described above, and the “then” is the desired action that will lead to meeting your goal. For the person aiming for a consistent at-home strength routine, the “if” could be “if I just got home from my run,” and the then could be, “then I’ll do dumbbell exercises” or “then I’ll follow along with an online core routine.”
Give it Time
As Mutrie notes, people often struggle to establish new good habits. So don’t consider yourself weak-willed or a failure if you’ve been unable to immediately adapt your old workout routine to the current reality. Keep setting yourself up for success by creating good cues, and do your desired behavior the next time you encounter those cues.
Have faith that sticking to your desired new routine will become easier. “As the habit gets stronger, it acquires the capacity to trigger the behavior automatically, without requiring any prior deliberation,” Gardner says.
Eventually, your default upon encountering a cue, such as a midday alarm to remind you to take a work break, will be to do 10 minutes of stretching, or to clear your head with a short run, or whatever new action you’ve tied to that cue.
While waiting for that automatic impulse to kick in, keep focusing on the rewards. “Those who succeed will have found that the benefits they feel provide them with the motivation to overcome barriers,” Mutrie says.
Be a Choice Architect
Choice architecture is an idea that originated in behavioral economics and was popularized by Nobel laureate Richard Thaler. It has to do with how the environment in which we make choices affects the likelihood that we’ll make a desirable decision. The classic example from economics concerns participation in a workplace retirement plan. When participating in the plan is set as the default, more people take part than when they have to opt in to the program.
A layperson’s translation of choice architecture is “make it easy to do the right thing.” This thinking lies behind common advice such as to keep a water bottle at your work station to ensure you’re well-hydrated, or to lay out your outfit the night before a planned morning run.
In the context of creating new habits, choice architecture means that, in addition to being as specific as possible, your cues are easily encountered. “It is possible, for example, to form a habit for going running after going to church, but if you only go to church at Christmas, it is not worthwhile trying to form this habit,” Gardner says.
In practical terms, being able to see your foam roller from your couch, or not having to dig your weights out of the attic every time you use them, will make it more likely that your desired use of them will become a habit.
Evaluate and Adjust as Needed
Despite setting up good cues and rewards, or practicing if-then thinking, and giving yourself time for your new behaviors to stick, you might still find yourself falling short. Then it might be time to step back and look at your original plan.
“If someone fails to establish a desired habit, it would be worth reconsidering whether the behavior is unrealistic,” Gardner says. If you’ve been someone who uses cardio machines at the gym three times a week, and now want to run outside daily because otherwise you’re going to lose your mind, that might be too big of a leap at once. Similarly, telling yourself you should keep running as much as when you regularly had others to train with might not be feasible given your current stress level.
“A good idea is to review goals every week,” Mutrie says. “If you’re not achieving them, try for a new goal that is more realistic, and build back up to more challenging goals.”
It’s also okay to scrap your plans if the reward side of the cue-reward formula isn’t working for you. “It may be somebody discovers that, after attempting to do the behavior, it isn’t as enjoyable as they thought,” Gardner says.
It might be that at-home yoga videos simply don’t replace the reward you feel after going to a group class. If so, you could consider other exercises, such as rope stretching, that can also improve flexibility and center your mind.
Things are challenging enough right now. Make your desired new habits a positive in your life. As Mutrie says, “Be nice to yourself rather than a hard taskmaster, and you will be more likely to succeed.”
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Scott is a veteran running, fitness, and health journalist who has held senior editorial positions at Runner’s World and Running Times. Much of his writing translates sport science research and elite best practices into practical guidance for everyday athletes. He is the author or coauthor of several running books, including Running Is My Therapy, Advanced Marathoning, and Download the All Out Studio App. How to Learn to Love Solo Running Slate, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, and other members of the sedentary media. His lifetime running odometer is past 110,000 miles, but he’s as much in love as ever.
