Episode 47: What to Do When You Don’t Feel Motivated to Work Out
Hey there! 👋 I'm Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains), personal trainer and host of the Coaching Corner podcast. In this episode, I dive into strategies for maintaining workout consistency even when motivation is low. I share personal experiences and client stories to illustrate how progress in fitness can happen regardless of emotional state.
Key Takeaways:
✅ Start with small, manageable workout goals to build momentum.
✅ Deload workouts when needed to avoid burnout.
✅ Revisit and realign fitness goals to stay on track.
✅ Make workouts more enjoyable with cozy cardio, socializing, or switching up routines.
✅ Practice self-compassion and acceptance—show up and stay disciplined even when motivation dips.
Tune in to discover how to stay consistent and make progress even when motivation feels hard to find!
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Jayd (00:00):
You can go into your workout thinking this is bullshit, and you can be like, I really don't want to do this, and you still show up and do it. You'll get gains from that. So it doesn't really matter how you feel. You can still make significant progress in your fitness even when you're not really feeling it. Hey there. Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast. I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA, Jaydigains. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about how to approach your workouts. If you're feeling super low motivation, no matter your level of fitness, whether you have been working out for decades or if you are a brand new beginner to fitness, you're probably going to experience at some point this feeling of, I really don't want to do my workout. This happens to me all the time. I think I probably don't feel like doing my workout most of the time.
(01:00)
Every once in a while I feel like, oh yeah, I'm so excited to get my workout in, but I still show up and I still do the thing, right? Because the gains are important to me and I'm committed and disciplined. So in today's episode, I'm going to go a little bit more into detail about how you can stay consistent even when you're not feeling like doing the thing. I'm going to share some of my own experience and the things that my clients have also learned and sticking to their workout routines even when they're not really feeling super motivated. Now, before we move forward in the episode, make sure to subscribe to this channel if you are watching on YouTube and make sure to like the video. If you're listening to this podcast, make sure that you follow the podcast so that you get notified anytime there's a new episode.
(01:49)
You can also check out my website, Jaydigains.com, J-A-Y-D-I-G-A-N s.com. If you're interested in learning more about me and the services that I offer, I do offer online personal training, and I also have a ton of downloadable workout plans that you can check out as well as a membership site where I post new content every single week, including meal plans, recipes, workout programs, training tips, nutrition tips, and fat loss tips. You can find all of that on my website, Jaydigains.com. Now, without further ado, let's get into the episode and talk about what to do to help yourself stay consistent even when you're not feeling motivated.
(02:31)
Now, the first thing that you should keep in mind when it comes to your fitness, when it comes to your body, feeling motivated, doesn't really matter. You do not have to feel super, super motivated to make gains. The beautiful thing about our bodies is that they don't care what kind of attitude you have. If you show up and you do the thing or you do part of the thing and get your workouts in or you stay active, your body is going to give you the gains from that. So it's very forgiving. It's not work where you kind of have to show up and have a somewhat good attitude and mask how you feel. You can go into your workout thinking this is bullshit, and you can be like, I really don't want to do this, and you still show up and do it. You'll get gains from that.
(03:16)
So it doesn't really matter how you feel. You can still make significant progress in your fitness even when you're not really feeling it. The other thing to keep in mind is that motivation is just a feeling and just like any other feeling, it's going to come and go and it's going to fluctuate depending on a lot of different factors, how much sleep you've had, the total amount of stress that you have in your everyday life and other factors like your nutrition can also affect your motivation. So there's a lot of things that can affect it. The presence or absence of motivation is really kind of not a big deal when it comes to whether you make gains or not. However, it can make it hard for you to stay consistent, but the most important thing when it comes to making gains, reaching your fat loss goals, your muscle building goals or your strength goals or your athletic performance goals is that you show up and you put the work in regardless of how you feel.
(04:10)
But if you have low motivation, that can make it harder to show up. So these are a few of the strategies that I recommend my clients use and that I use for myself to help me stay consistent and show up even when I'm not really feeling like it. Number one is to start small. I think it's really helpful to think of what's your bare minimum workout that you can do for yourself. Sometimes that can be just as simple as a 10 minute workout where you're going to walk on the treadmill or get on a cardio machine and then do some stretches. Some days that's all you're going to have in the tank. Some days that's all you're going to be able to really think about, especially if you're doing a really high intensity or high volume weightlifting routine or maybe you're doing athletic training and the workout itself is something that takes a lot of energy and you're just kind of like, I don't want to even think about that right now.
(05:04)
Sometimes when you just tell yourself, I'm just going to start small, I'm just going to start with the warmup. I'm going to warm up and see how I feel afterwards, so I'm going to get on the treadmill or I'm going to get on the cardio machine for just five to 10 minutes, and then I'm going to do some dynamic stretches and then maybe some priming exercises, and if I'm still feeling like, you know what? I really just don't have it in me today, then go home. But what often happens when I tell my clients, just do the bare minimum, show up, do the warmup and then see how you feel. Most of the time, once you actually get moving, once your feet are on that machine or once you are doing your stretches, your brain is actually thinking like, okay, I could probably do a little bit more.
(05:49)
The motivation often comes from doing the thing, so don't make the mistake of putting the cart before the horse. The motivation is not what gets you to show up. You show up, you do the thing, and then you get more motivated. So it's kind of like one of those old fashioned water pumps where you would have to take a cup of water with you to the pump, pour the water in, and then be able to actually access the water from the well. Motivation is like that. You kind of have to get started to rev the engine a little bit to prime the pump, and then you might surprise yourself at how motivated you feel after you just start with that really small goal and achievable goal of just doing 10 to 15 minutes of your warmup. Now, another thing that you can do, which is what I tell my clients, is if you need to just deload that workout, if you're feeling really fucked up mentally and you do the warmup and you're still feeling like I am dreading this workout, then that could be a sign that you may be over training or you may be overstressed and your body and your brain need less stress.
(06:58)
So your body and your brain oftentimes read the stress stimulus from your workouts. If you're doing high intensity or high volume, it will read that as the same thing is emotional and mental stress that comes from other areas of your life, and there's only so much stress that your system as a whole can handle before it starts to break down, before you start to lose efficiency. And so your system may be overwhelmed and that's okay. That happens to everyone. So in that case, what you can do is just reduce the overall intensity of your workout, still do the workout, do the exercises that are in your exercise plan, but instead of going to an RPE nine where you're stopping just before muscle failure, maybe you leave two or three reps in the tank and you stop a lot sooner, just think about practicing the motions of the exercises rather than approaching muscle failure.
(07:51)
Or if you're doing strength training, just stop before you get that CNS fatigue starting to set in, right? Deloading is always an option, and there may be seasons of your life where you need to deload almost every workout that's happened for some of my clients. Now, this doesn't mean that you're going to lose all of your gains. It will make your gains slower because you won't be pushing yourself, and when it comes to building muscle and getting stronger, you do need to be able to challenge yourself approach muscle failure and approach form failure in order for your body to get that stimulus that it's time to grow. But if you are encountering a lot of stresses in your life already and your system just can't handle the overload, the progressive overload of stress, and it's very, very, very fine line between stressing your body too much to the point where you become too stressed out or overwhelmed and burned out in those seasons, it's okay to just take a step back, make your workouts less intense.
(08:56)
It's actually going to help you in the long run to reach your goals if you do that versus just stopping showing up for your workouts altogether, which is sometimes what happens for people, they'll feel that low motivation or they'll feel like, I can't really push myself and they just don't work out at all. I would so much rather you show up and deload and do that for a couple of weeks if you need to until you feel like you're mentally and energetically in a better place that you can start to turn the volume up or turn the intensity up because that consistency of showing up is going to, you will get gains from that. You will very likely not lose gains from working out that way, and you'll keep the habit going. And again, showing up and doing the thing will fuel your motivation in the long run, much more than just falling off the wagon completely and not showing up at all.
(09:49)
Now, number two, there's a distinction between having a day where you're just not feeling like it and your motivation for that day is low versus if you notice for yourself a pattern of feeling low motivation over the course of a number of days, a number of weeks, like a long-term, just I don't want to do this. When that happens, it may be a sign that you need to revisit your goals and revisit your why. It may be that your current workout program is no longer in alignment with what is actually important to you. You may actually need to change up what you're doing for your workouts to align with something that is either more important to you or better suited to the season of life that you're in right now. Perfect example for this is last year around the holidays, I was trying to be in a power lifting program and I was making a lot of success, but because of the stress of the holidays and the election and a lot of interpersonal stuff that was going on in my life, I was experiencing a lot of stress, which was making me dread my workouts.
(11:04)
I started really dreading lifting the bar and I started dreading the heavier weights that I was having to put on the bar. Every workout and the progressive overload was becoming too daunting with everything considered going on in my life. And so I approached my coach and we decided to switch up my program to just focus on hypertrophy and muscle gains, which for me is a lot less stressful of a type of programming versus power lifting where you're lifting heavy weights and it can often trigger a fight or flight response, especially when you're getting into those higher weights or doing AMRAP sets as many reps as possible. So we scaled my workouts down in the sense of how intense they were. We scaled up the volume to really focus on muscle gains, and that helped me so much. I felt so much more motivated to show up to my workouts.
(12:02)
I was able to stick to my workout program a lot better than towards the end of the power lifting block. So sometimes that's the call that you have to make. In general, really high intensity blocks like a strength block for power lifting is going to be a lot more stress on your system. You're going to get a lot more central nervous system fatigue from that, and if your system is already fatigued from outside stressors, that something to consider about if you're feeling this low motivation, you may need to switch up your workout program. Now, this doesn't mean that you completely give up on your goals when you have to switch gears like this. When it comes to your fitness, whether you are improving your strength, improving your muscle size or hypertrophy, improving your cardiovascular fitness or in a calorie deficit, prioritizing fat loss, any progress that you make within any program is a net positive for your fitness.
(13:00)
Sometimes though, we need to switch gears and focus on different aspects of our fitness according to what is important to us at that time. So if you've been in a fat loss phase for a while and you've been really focusing on trimming fat, and then that may reach a point where it's not as important to you anymore because maybe you've hit a plateau or maybe your gains have slowed down, maybe you're in a recomp and your body weight isn't going down, although you are seeing gains in the gym and your clothes are fitting more loosely. So if that's the case, you may want to place your focus on why am I showing up for my workouts? It's not so much to burn fat anymore. I want to continue to see myself getting stronger, and when you switch that as your why is like I want to see myself getting stronger, more muscular, you may experience more motivation because that is something that you're seeing active gains in on a week by week basis.
(13:52)
Whereas especially if you're in a recomp, the gains are just slower in terms of your fat loss and you're not necessarily going to see the scale number going down. Keep in mind, I did actually do an entire episode of the Coaching Corner podcast on signs that you are in a recomp phase and ways that you can track your progress even if the scale isn't moving. So make sure to check out that episode. It's episode number 40. You can check that out on the YouTube channel, or you can go to the actual podcast site for episode 40, so revisit your whys and try to reconnect with your goals or maybe shift the importance that you place on different goals to give yourself a little bit of time to focus on some different aspect of your fitness. Now, number three, another thing that I really suggest is to try to make it enjoyable.
(14:40)
Try to make your workouts as enjoyable as possible. A few years ago, there was a trend on TikTok where a lot of specifically women were doing what was called cozy cardio, where they would do their cardio at home and they would have their treadmill in front of their TV, and they would set the lights to be really dim, put their LED lights on to make the lighting really soft and rainbowy, and they would have a yummy beverage as well as their water, and they'd put a favorite show on the TV or a movie and they would do their cardio walking or cycling or whatever. While they have done all of these other things to make the experience more pleasurable, more cozy, and more comfortable, these are all great ideas for ways that you can make your workout experience more enjoyable. But there's a lot of other ways that you can do this too.
(15:31)
If you enjoy being around other people, if you feel like other people give you energy, consider joining a gym or maybe taking a few group fitness classes. You can also find a workout buddy who will show up and do the workout with you. A lot of people find this super motivational, and some people really do enjoy having a home gym so that they can work out in a setting that they're in control of and they can decorate it how they like. Also, if you want to talk to people, but maybe work out from your home gym, streaming your workouts to a social media platform like Twitch or TikTok or Instagram are great ways to connect with other people and socialize while you're working out in your own space. Again, you can switch up your training program, use a different form of exercise and try a different form of exercise.
(16:20)
Something gets that is exciting to you or that you can look forward to take a break from the type of training that maybe you are a little bit bored with. If you don't listen to your own music, maybe start taking some headphones with you to the gym and putting on some music that you really enjoy that gets you pumped or that gets you in the state of mind that you feel really good about. All of these are great ideas for how you can make the experience of working out more enjoyable for yourself. And lastly, I can't really stress enough how important it is to practice self-compassion and acceptance, right? It is okay for you to feel how you feel. How you feel is not wrong. If you feel low motivation about your workouts, this doesn't mean that you're failing. It doesn't mean that you're going to fail or that you're never going to reach your goals.
(17:11)
Remember that our feelings, they come and go. They're often a signal to something that's going on in our lives that we need to be aware of, right? Our feelings are never wrong. They're just an alert system, and if you're feeling the alert system go off that you're not wanting to do your workouts and your system is kind of rejecting this practice, then you need to really reconsider the things that we talked about in the podcast episode of what maybe needs to change, but also keep in mind that sometimes you're just not going to feel like doing it, but show up anyway. Have the discipline to show up anyway, because you may feel better once you start, and some days you're just going to hate it the whole time, and that's okay because your body is still going to give you gains from that.
(18:01)
Thank you so much for watching. If you are on YouTube or listening to this podcast episode, again, my name is Jayd Harrison, AKA, Jaydigains. You can find out more about me and the services that I offer by going to Jaydigains.com. Feel free to join me while I'm live on my Twitch channel, Twitch.tv/Jaydigains. I usually go live on Tuesdays as well as other days throughout the week when I have time. Let me know in the comments below on YouTube what you do to help yourself deal with low motivation. I'd love to hear about the strategies that work for you. I'll see you in the next episode. In the meantime, take care of yourself and I'll see you soon.
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