All of us know someone who simply loves going to the gym and being active. Maybe that person is even you. Even if you genuinely love the feeling you get while working out, there is no doubt you get bored from time to time. If you’re already someone who doesn’t have the most fun at the gym, you are probably really wondering how to make working out fun. You simply will not continue to exercise if it is never fun. Here are three steps to making your fitness experience less of a chore and something you actually look forward to doing each day.
Find a community of people to exercise with.
Community is the reason people stay at gyms. Social contracts – telling people you’ll do something – are extremely powerful motivators and the group you workout with will keep you accountable to continue showing up. Even beyond this fact, working out with a group of people gives you people to chat with during rest periods and compete with during intense exercises like CrossFit or HIIT.
If you are in a new town or simply don’t have friends that like to workout, check out a few boutique fitness facilities. CrossFit boxes, OrangeTheory Fitness, and SoulCycle are all great options. Try a few out, see what you enjoy, then make the commitment to join the community and get involved.
Create a reward system.
One strategy for how to make working out fun is to give yourself something to look forward to following that workout. Many people do this with treat foods. In our opinion, there are much better reward systems to have than one which correlates something healthy like exercising with something less healthy, like pizza or ice cream.
Your reward system should be centered on something which makes you feel great. Maybe every time you get to the gym ten times or more in a month, you buy yourself a new workout outfit. Or after you achieve a specific goal, you treat yourself to a professional massage. Find things which will keep the cycle of improvement going.
Set an external goal.
It’s very popular to talk about how you need intrinsic motivation and personal goals in order to have success in fitness – and having a why which keeps you going is great – but an external motivator can really keep you on task when you don’t want to go to the gym. It also makes the fitness you’re doing way more enjoyable because you see it helping you toward a specific destination.
If you’re into endurance sports, see if your city has a half marathon coming up or make a trip of it and check out a sprint triathlon in a city you’ve always wanted to visit. Giving yourself a reason to keep going to the gym makes everything much more fun than just spinning your wheels and showing up with no defined purpose each day.
How to make working out fun:
At the end of the day, you need to combine a reward system with an external goal to make your workouts more fun. It also helps a ton if you find a group of people – even if it is just one or two of your friends – to workout with. It will keep you going when you’re feeling no motivation and give you someone to compete with when you need the extra push.
