Motivation for physical activity

Do you want to lose weight or improve your body? Don’t you want to get diabetes, cancer or heart disease? Do you need to lower blood pressure or improve cholesterol? Do you dream of strengthening your bones? Do you want to live healthy for a long time? Seems like a good trigger to start moving. Meanwhile, convincing people to exercise, and convincing them that it will have a positive effect on their health, turns out to be a completely ineffective tactic. For years, we have been bombarded with information that regular physical activity is essential to losing weight, preventing serious disease, and increasing the chances of a long life in good shape. Yes, we want to be healthy and slim and we want to live longer, yet most people fail to lead an active lifestyle. Therefore, it makes no sense to use arguments that don’t work. It’s time to try a different incentive system. It’s time for the strategy marketers use: We have to believe that regular traffic is a way to improve our current situation.Activity can immediately benefit your well-being and quality of life.
Most of us have such a tight schedule that only for the really important things that immediately bring tangible benefits, we can make another try. We don’t want to devote our time to something that might produce results in some years.
The feeling of contentment, well-being and less stress as an immediate reward for exercise stimulates more effectively than chances of avoiding cancer and other diseases in the future. Apparently, people who exercise to feel better now exercise more willingly and regularly than people motivated by distant health reasons. Even the successful pursuit of a slim body is not enough motivation in the long run.

Movement is a true elixir of life, not a bitter pill to swallow when something goes wrong, nor is it a penalty for heavy weight. Therefore, an effective trigger must be emotional, not medical.

Motivation and age
What motivates people to exercise usually depends on their age, gender, and life circumstances. For example, for young people, the desire to appear attractive is usually a strong incentive to start exercising, but not strong enough to continue training. Their long-term motivation is to reduce stress, which is ensured by regular physical activity. On the other hand, the elderly often start moving for health reasons. On the other hand, what allows them to continue regular physical activity is the possibility of meeting friends on this occasion, making new acquaintances, that is, getting what they feel they lack.
Women are effectively motivated by improved quality of life and well-being, and men are motivated by health reasons, even further (perhaps because men don’t like to speak out loud about their mental well-being). So it seems like we only take seriously what we currently care about, and what we need in the here and now.Therefore, the strongest motivation for exercise is what we can get for it in the here and now.

The value of activity
Many, if not most people start exercising because they want to lose weight. But once they achieve their goal, or when the weight loss turns out to be slow and unsatisfactory, they give up exercising. Even slight weight loss with regular exercise yields tangible results in the form of a lower resting heart rate, lower blood pressure, better fitness, and better well-being. Therefore, you need to build a positive attitude to exercise, and reduce the focus on the need to lose weight. The disappointment that accompanies the failure to fight off excess weight, and thus the loss of self-confidence, is a simple way to discourage physical activity and treat it as ineffective and pointless.

So start moving. Don’t put it off, start today. Start with a brisk walk or bike ride. See how you will feel afterwards. What can you expect? Increased energy, stress relief, greater feelings of productivity, greater commitment to what you have to do, and even (without exaggeration!) feeling happier. That’s why it’s worth moving on. This is why some people get up early in the morning and go for a run. Use this source as often as you can, and a slim and healthy figure will follow.