So you just can’t seem to make yourself get up and go to the gym? You were consistent for months, your practice was going well and your strength was increasing but now you just feel meh.
What can you do to get through this? A quick google search will get ya get something like this:
Carve out time for training, schedule it into your calendar and stick to it. Easy right?
Change it up and try something new. Variety is the spice of life!
Get an accountability partner, app or habit tracker. Trick yourself into it?
Yeah, sure. You’d do all those things if you felt motivated to train in the first place. But what if I gave you permission to ignore all of that? What if I told you there’s a better way?
I had a client this week in this exact spot. She wanted to train but she just wasn’t feeling it. The energy was gone. The excitement for training had worn off. She wanted it, but she just couldn’t make herself get up and go to the gym. She started to become less compliant with her online training programs and started to feel bad for missing sessions. But she was actually still consistently training twice per week. It just wasn’t the 4 times she signed up for.
My advice? Remove the expectation. If you are having to force yourself every time you train, you’re not enjoying it and it’s not a sustainable practice.
In Australia right now we are in the depths of winter. There’s a book, Wintering by Katherine May. She uses winter as a beautiful metaphor to speak to her lived experience of depression and hardship. I’m not saying that’s the same as going through an unmotivated period of training, but there are some lessons we can pull from it.
May talks about periods where she felt ‘out of sync with her body.’ To overcome those she had to ‘invite winter in’. She likens it to icing an injury; feeling drawn to coldness to help alleviate pain. She suggests we can lean into winter, embrace the slowness, and understand that — like animals and plants that hibernate over winter— humans too, might need to preserve energy seasonally.
When you have a training practice you get to start embracing seasonal training. Once you’ve established a practice you’re in it for life. Life has seasons. Ebbs and flows. Periods of growth. Periods of hibernation. Winter.
How to train with the seasons
Just like flora and fauna that slow down over winter, we too can give ourselves permission to slow down. Here’s my advice if you find yourself stuck in a season of low motivation: Find your minimum viable volume of training. What’s the minimum number of sessions you know you can commit to each week? Not the minimum amount of training you want to do, but the minimum you actually will do. For me, it’s 2 sessions a week. Bearing in mind I normally train 4-5 times per week.
Would I be happy with myself if I only trained twice per week for the rest of my life? No. Can I give myself permission to only train twice per week while I’m in a low season and see how it feels? Sure. Will it negatively affect my training progress and my strength gains? Maybe, but probably not that much.
Back to my client who was struggling to get her home sessions done. It wasn’t productive to have these sessions in her schedule that she just wasn’t doing. In fact, it made her feel worse. So instead of trying to find some magical way to motivate her to do them, we simply removed the expectation.
Allowed her a period of wintering.
Once she sees that she’s consistently hitting those 2-3 sessions per week, she’ll naturally start to find her rhythm and we can build up to 4 sessions per week again. By allowing slower periods, we're able to build a long-term sustainable practice. No tricks, hacks or guilt.
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