We’ve all experienced a time (or ten) when we’ve fallen into a fitness rut. Work, school, or any other facet of life gets busy, and our healthy self-care habits start to slide.
The process may start innocently enough—we cut short or miss a workout, make a poor snack or meal choice, or stay up too late—but it compounds when we allow one poor choice to influence our behavior when presented with a subsequent choice. If we’re not careful, a day of poor choices can lead to a week, a month, or more (like the past 2 1/2 years!?!) of generally less-than-optimal choices.
No matter the duration of the rut, here’s a simple and engaging strategy to get back on track when you realize you’ve landed in one. Of course, you can use it to make better choices before you find ourselves in a rut too.
So don’t feel like you have to wait to start using it. Get started today! 😉
Turn your fitness into a game
If you’re human (and I’ll assume you are), your brain is predisposed to enjoy games. There are obviously different types of games—sports, board games, video games, cards & dice, puzzles—but they all share a few characteristics:
- Games have rules. This is fairly straightforward although the rules themselves sometimes aren’t.
- Games have points. Points are simply a way to record the accomplishment of miniature objectives. Sometimes they’re extrinsic—e.g. 6 points for a touchdown in football. Sometimes they’re intrinsic—e.g. a 12-letter word on a crossword puzzle is usually harder to solve than a 3-letter word.
- Games have a final objective. This can be a competitive or a cooperative “win” (i.e. scoring more points) or simply “finishing” (i.e. as in a crossword or Sudoku puzzle), perhaps in a specified period of time (i.e. another type of “points”).
These three characteristics are what make games mentally engaging. Games focus our attention by giving us points when we accomplish tiny, rules-based objectives—subsequently causing our brains to get dopamine hits which entice us to repeat the action—on our way to achieving a final, bigger objective.
By viewing fitness as a game, we can take advantage of that “mind trick” to make it easier to do the things we need to do to get and stay out of any fitness “rut”.
If we’re going to turn fitness into a game, the rules and final objective parts should be relatively obvious pieces. The final objective is the result we’re after (e.g. losing 5 lbs., squatting our body weight, running a marathon in 3 1/2 hours). The rules are the actions we need to take to accomplish the final objective (e.g. following a specific training plan and nutrition guidelines).
The points part of the equation needs a bit of extra explaining, however, because it’s perhaps both less obvious and is usually the part that’s ignored when we think of fitness anyway.
Too many times when it comes to our fitness lives, we see our actions purely in black and white. We either ate what we should have, or we didn’t. We exercised, or not. We went to bed on time, or we stayed up too late. The issue with viewing our fitness actions this way is that we don’t get that little burst of dopamine when we “fail” with one of them. On top of that, we often actually feel worse about ourselves in the process because we “failed at something simple that we ‘should’ be able to do”.
But we want to make our fitness actions fun. So instead of viewing them as successes or failures, one point or no points, we should practice doing the opposite.
Put points on a continuum starting at 1
A simple way to do this is to make what you think is “the worst” action in any given scenario worth 1 point (or 10% or whatever else makes sense to you). Then make what you think is “the best” action that you might currently be capable of in the scenario worth 5 points (100%, etc.). Possible actions in between are then worth 2, 3, or 4 points.
Here’s an example:
The Less Good Option:
When you get home from work, you’re tired and hungry. Because you hadn’t prepared food ahead of time, you grab the first thing you see… which happens to be a bag of Oreos. Then, you figure since you messed up your diet already, you might as well have a frozen pizza for dinner. Without realizing it, your brain just gave you a big old “0 points” and started digging a rut.
The Better Option:
Same scenario, except you take 10 seconds to consider possible options. You still look around to see what’s available, but now you put all the options on a 1-5 (worst to best) scale and end up with this:
- Oreos + frozen pizza
- Kashi cookies (less sugar & more fiber than Oreos) + frozen pizza
- An apple + frozen pizza
- Baby carrots & hummus + frozen pizza
- An apple + yesterday’s leftovers
Notice how #5 isn’t necessarily a 5-course meal. Rather, it’s a “better option” that falls within your current capacity. And, even if you end up choosing any of the options from 2–5, you still made a better choice than Oreos + pizza.
Brain says, “Two points is better than one. That’s a small win!”
Dopamine hit.
Rut avoided for another day.
Putting it into practice
It should come as no surprise that making assessments when you’re more clear-headed is a better option than when you’re hungry and tired. It’s also easier to make better decisions when better decisions are easily available (i.e. the baby carrots are in the fridge at home instead of at the store).
With that in mind, consider a habit/action that you’ve been struggling to perform consistently, and come up with a short list of options that are better (and worse) to varying degrees. Write out the list, and put it in a spot where you’re likely to see it at the time when you typically make the related less-than-optimal decision.
At some point soon, you’ll still have to choose to make a better decision. But at least you’ll have a fun way of more easily making a better choice!
Bonus points if you also keep track of your points and try to improve the average as the weeks pass.