The Easy Way To Build A Gym Habit
While I know meditation is the key to all forms of discipline…
If all you do is meditate, after 10 years you don’t have much to show for it.
That’s where this habit comes in. The second most important habit when it comes to building self-control is weight lifting.
Let me explain why.
As we learned in the meditation chapter, the prefrontal cortex is strengthened when you do two things.
- Doing the things you’d rather not do. (Like going to the gym)
- Resisting the things that tempt you. (Continuing to push when it hurts)
The entire time you’re at the gym, you’re doing both of these.
You don’t want to hit that next set, you do it anyways. +1 Discipline
You want to give up mid-set, but you keep going. +1 Discipline.
Every time you’re physically pumping your muscles, you could say it’s like doing the exact same thing to your discipline muscle.
Every time you force yourself to cut through your excuses and go to the gym, you get 1% better at ignoring ALL of your excuses for the rest of your life.
Soon the self-control you built in the gym begins to spill over into other area of your life.
You stop making excuses with your diet.
You stop making excuses with your spending.
You stop making excuses with your love life.
Then your life just starts spiraling upwards.
Your body begins to look better, so you begin to feel better.
Feeling better leads to more confidence.
That confidence leads to more opportunities and so on.
If meditation is the left leg of discipline, weight lifting is the right leg.
Once you have both, you can walk anywhere you want to go.
And trust me after doing this habit for 2–3 years, there’s nothing quite like the way people treat you once it’s clear you care about your body.
How to Build a Gym Habit:
Again like meditation we’re going to use progressive overloading here.
To build a gym habit start at the absolute smallest you can tolerate, and if you have medical issues get clearance from your doctor first.
I’ve included a level 0 on this progressive overload because sometimes life seems so difficult you can’t even muster the strength to get out of bed.
You have succeeded on level 0 if you can just manage to put on your gym clothes first thing in the morning for 30 days.
If it makes you feel better, while I started here, I now EXCITEDLY workout 4x a week for 2+ hours at a time and have a body I’m extremely happy with. It took me 2-years, but the time was gonna pass anyways.
If you follow the progressive overload, you may find by 2025, you’ll have the body of an olympian, and it will only get better from there.
Level 0: Just put on your gym clothes first thing in the morning, for 30 days.
Level 1: Park at the gym for 30 days.
Level 2: Easy Workout 15 minutes for 30 days.
Level 3: Easy workout for 30 minutes, for 30 days.
Level 4: Easy workout for 1hr, for 30 days.
Level 5: Moderate workout for 1hr, for 30 days.
Level 6: Do the workout you’ve intended from the beginning forever.
If it seems like a long time to build a gym habit I want to remind you.
99% of people who start a gym habit every new year fail by March.
Why?
Because they try to do the hard workout immediately after they start & they do…
For about 6 weeks, then they quit.
Using this you WILL take longer to build the habit.
But next January you’ll be ahead of the people who started and quit, because you started slow and just never stopped.
Important note:
For best results I highly recommend identifying the muscles you want to build.
Then after you identify them, watch a man named Jeff Nippard on youtube, he taught me everything I needed to know to build an attractive body.
Building a gym habit won’t just build your discipline, it will make you more attractive and by extension make your life easier and raise your self-esteem.
There is absolutely no reason why you should not workout excluding explicit instruction from your doctor not to.
And for 99% of people your doctor is probably telling you to go to the gym anyways, as it improves your health in virtually every dimension.
Application step:
Do this today, search your local gyms and see which one is closest to you or within your price range.
Go there and set up a membership TODAY.
After you do this, start the progressive overloading for the gym habit.
Post-Script:
What you just read was an excerpt from my 2023 passion project, project discipline.
If you want to read the full book you can get it here: