In last week’s tip, I suggested that putting training sessions on your calendar and treating them like appointments would help to improve your consistency by reducing decision fatigue, minimizing emotion—like dependence on motivation—and making exercise time more visible.
It works because it answers an important logistical question in advance: When exactly will training happen?
But there’s another question that’s just as important—and it directly affects follow-through: How easy will it be to start when the time arrives?
The elephant in the room
You may have heard the metaphorical riddle, “How do you eat an elephant?”
The answer—one bite at a time—is meant to portray the idea that large, overwhelming, or time-consuming goals or projects are more easily completed when they’re broken into manageable, incremental steps.
When we face a large or challenging task, it’s easy to fall into a kind of mental paralysis because we assume it will require more energy than we currently have available.
But we also know that small, simple tasks require significantly less energy to complete. And we’re often willing to take on those tasks because we’re confident that we both have the energy to expend and can easily replenish it.
Getting started—even with the smallest possible action—is what breaks the paralysis. And there’s a law of physics that explains why.
Newton’s first law of motion
Even if you don’t know Newton’s First Law off the top of your head, you’re certainly familiar with the idea.
The law states that “unless acted upon by an external force, an object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion continues moving in a straight line at a constant speed”.
Getting back to our metaphorical elephant: If we’re paralyzed by the impossibility of eating the elephant in a single bite, we tend to avoid confronting the task entirely and “stay at rest”. But when we start with a small bite that requires very little energy, momentum begins to build—and we tend to “stay in motion” until the task is finished.
In practical terms, this concept applies whether we’re working on a house or work project or following through on a training session that we put on the calendar. If we can just get over the hurdle of starting—generating momentum that makes it easier to keep going—we’ve significantly increased our odds of finishing.
A few practical ways to get started
Making it easier to start comes down to two things: what you decide in advance, and what you set up in advance.
The mental piece: decide what you’ll do before you need to decide
One of the most well-researched ways to improve follow-through on a planned behavior is to create an implementation intention—essentially, a specific “if-then” plan that removes the need for an in-the-moment decision.
The format is simple: If [situation], then [action].
Applied to training: If my alarm goes off at 5 AM on Tuesday, then I’ll get out of bed and put on my running shoes.
Notice that the action isn’t “complete a full workout.” It’s just the first step. That’s intentional—the goal is to get you moving, not to pre-commit to an entire session.
The physical piece: make the first step obvious
The other half is environmental. When your surroundings make the right action easy and visible, you spend less mental energy deciding whether and how to start.
A few examples specific to training:
- Set a notification on the calendar entry itself—not just the session on your calendar, but an alarm that fires when it’s time to start
- Sleep in your training clothes if you exercise first thing in the morning
- Put your running shoes next to your bed the night before, or roll out your yoga mat on the living room floor before you go to sleep
- Decide on a standard warm-up that every session begins with—so “starting” means one specific, familiar movement, not a blank slate
The last one is worth expanding on because a consistent warm-up does double duty: it reduces the friction of starting and it builds a reliable on-ramp into your training mindset. Over time, that first movement becomes a cue—the mental equivalent of your running shoes sitting on the floor next to your bed.
None of these require extra willpower—and that’s the point. You’re making the decision when it’s easy (the night before, the planning phase) so you don’t have to make it when it’s hard (5 AM, half asleep, debating whether you “feel like it”).
Putting it into practice
Look at one training session you’re planning for the coming week and ask a simple question: What would make starting this session easier?
Then create an implementation intention with that information and set up your environment accordingly.
It might seem like too simple of a strategy to make a difference, but it’s usually the simple strategies that do.