No motivation to train? How to keep going anyway

You have started before. The first few weeks go well, then a busy period arrives, and three months later you are back where you began. The explanation you give yourself afterwards usually involves discipline and character.

That explanation is wrong. In a meta-analysis covering almost 30,000 people, 47.6 per cent of participants who intended to be active never turned that intention into behaviour.¹ The researchers conclude that translating a good intention into action sits close to a coin toss. Wanting it is not the problem. Organising it is.

Motivation fluctuates, your diary does not

Motivation is a state. It depends on your sleep, your workload, the weather and whether an unpleasant email landed that morning. An approach that runs on feeling like it collapses the moment life pushes back. And life pushes back every month.

A fixed slot holds up. Tuesday at half past seven. Thursday straight after work. You make the decision once, instead of fifty times a year. With behavioural change that is the first thing we organise together: a slot that survives a week which gets out of hand.

Missing one session breaks nothing

In the best known study on habit formation, researchers followed 96 people for twelve weeks while they repeated the same behaviour at the same moment every day. The time it took before that behaviour felt automatic ranged from 18 to 254 days. Those who repeated it more consistently built up automaticity faster. And missing a single opportunity had no material effect on the process.²

That last finding matters most here. One missed session costs you almost nothing. What does cost you is the conclusion you draw from it: that it has failed again, that you know yourself, that you will pick it up in six months. The missed week does very little. The months of silence that follow do everything.

The habit is in turning up

There is a misunderstanding about training and habits: that the session itself will one day run on autopilot. It will not. A heavy set stays heavy, even after three years.

What does become automatic is turning up. Your bag is packed, you know what is on the programme, and you walk into the studio at twenty-five past seven without having negotiated with yourself on the way. In practice that is where the difference sits between people who keep going and people who start over. So put your attention on the threshold. What your physical training looks like is something we decide once we know which two or three slots in your week genuinely exist.

The same minutes, better spread

Rhythm is about spreading. In 2023, 44 per cent of Dutch adults met the national physical activity guidelines. More than one in ten collected enough active minutes but spread them so poorly across the week that they still fell outside the guideline. Had that group distributed their activity better, the country would have reached 56 per cent.³

The same number of minutes, a different distribution, a different outcome. That is exactly where catching up goes wrong: three hard weeks, two empty ones, and then the conclusion that it does not work. Twice a week all year long delivers more than five times a week during March. We wrote about that earlier in why your training schedule often does not work.

Why you do it decides whether you stay

None of this writes off motivation. The type of motivation decides how long you keep going. A systematic review of dozens of studies found that people who exercise because they value it themselves sustain it over the long term. Those who exercise out of guilt, outside pressure or dissatisfaction with their own body drop out sooner.⁴

That is uncomfortable news, because dissatisfaction is often exactly what gets people started. That reason is allowed to be there. Something else has to join it in the first months: noticing that the stairs are easier, that you sleep better, that you have something left on a Friday evening. With nutrition and lifestyle we therefore steer on what you get back, more than on what the scales say. If the pressure sits mainly in your head and your working week, burnout and stress is the more honest starting point.

How we build rhythm at de Werf

We start with reflection: when did it go wrong before, and what was happening that week? Then we fix the rhythm, usually smaller than people propose themselves. Two slots you still manage in a bad week are worth more than four that only fit into a good month. The result comes from adding those weeks up.

And if you disappear, you hear from us. No lecture, just a question about when you are coming back.

A real example from our practice

"I had started four times before and it went well for six weeks every time. At de Werf we first worked out when it went wrong: always during a busy week at work, and after that I was too embarrassed to come back. We made my two fixed slots smaller, so they fitted into a week like that as well. The first time I stayed away for a fortnight, I simply got a message asking when I was coming in. I have been training for fourteen months now and I have had three dips in that time. A dip used to be the end of it. Now it is just a dip."

Ready to turn this into a rhythm?

Schedule an intake at de Werf in The Hague, with no obligation. We look at where it went wrong before, what fits into your week and which two slots you start with.

Schedule an intake

Read also:
Our coaching in behavioural change and physical training.

Sources:
¹ Feil, Fritsch and Rhodes - British Journal of Sports Medicine (2023)
² Lally et al - European Journal of Social Psychology (2010)
³ RIVM - part of the Dutch population is active enough but too unevenly across the week
⁴ Teixeira et al - International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity (2012)