How do I stay motivated to work out?

The honest answer is that you mostly don't. Motivation comes and goes for everyone, including people who've trained for ten years. What keeps them going is a setup where they don't need to feel motivated to show up.

So the goal isn't to feel more motivated. It's to make working out the default even on days you don't feel like it.

Make the minimum tiny

Most skipped workouts are skipped before they start, because the full session feels like too much. So lower the bar for what counts. On a bad day, the rule can be "10 minutes, then I can leave". Most of the time you'll stay longer. And when you don't, you still kept the habit going, which matters more than that one session.

Put it on the calendar

"I'll go this week" is a wish. "Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 7am" is a plan. Fixed days and times take the decision out of it, and decisions are where motivation usually loses.

Give yourself a reason outside your own head

This is the one I think people underestimate the most. When the only person who knows you skipped is you, it's easy to skip. When someone else is involved, it gets a lot harder.

A few ways to do that:

• A training partner who's waiting for you at the gym
• A class you've already paid for
• A race or event with a date on it
• Some kind of competition where someone else's result depends on yours

That last one is the reason we built League of Fitness the way we did. You get matched 1v1 with someone at your level every day, and your workouts count toward the match. It's a lot harder to skip a run when you can see someone else is about to beat you. You don't need an app for this though. A friend with a shared goal works too.

Track something you can see go up

Seeing progress is motivating, but only if you can actually see it. Write down your lifts, your running times or just the number of sessions you've done this month. Weight on the scale moves slowly and jumps around for random reasons, so it's a bad thing to use as your only source of motivation.

Expect the dip

Almost everyone hits a wall around weeks 3 to 6, when the novelty is gone and the results aren't obvious yet. If you know it's coming, it's easier to push through. That's usually the point where people who quit and people who keep going split up, and it has very little to do with willpower.