Sunday You is impressive.
Sunday You buys vegetables, finds a programme, sets the plan and decides that this week will be different. Sunday You thinks 7am on Wednesday is a perfectly reasonable time to hit the gym.
Wednesday You has had three meetings, slept six hours, cannot find the other trainer and is wondering whether cereal counts as dinner.
Most plans are written by the first one and handed to the second with no consultation at all.
Motivation moves around
Motivation helps because it gets things moving. It gets us into the gym, out for the walk, signed up for something or clearing the rubbish out of the kitchen.
The amount available changes from one day to the next.
Some Wednesdays you will be quite happy to train. On others you will be working out how late you can leave it before admitting that you are staying home. This happens often enough that anything you want to keep doing for years will need to survive it.
An umbrella review looked at 55 reviews of exercise adherence in people with chronic conditions and older adults. Fourteen factors appeared in at least ten of those reviews, including enjoyment, social support, self-efficacy, programme design and how well exercise could be integrated into daily life.[1]
The people covered by the research had particular health and age-related circumstances, so the findings do not describe everybody. They still give us good reason to examine the routine itself when somebody repeatedly struggles with it.
How much you want to exercise is part of what happens. The journey, the timing, the equipment, the people around you and whether you enjoy it are in there as well.
The Wednesday Test
Think about an ordinary Wednesday.
You are probably working. There are other things that need doing and whatever enthusiasm arrived at the weekend has settled down a bit.
Would Wednesday You actually do what you have planned?
A gym twenty-five minutes away might be excellent. It also asks for fifty minutes in the car, which can make a forty-five-minute workout difficult to fit into an evening.
A seventy-five-minute programme may contain exactly the exercises you need. It will still cause trouble if the gaps in your diary are usually thirty-five minutes.
A meal plan can be nutritionally excellent and gradually disappear because it relies on two hours of preparation every Sunday.
These are useful things to notice because Wednesday You is the person who turns up most weeks. A routine built around that person has a better chance of surviving ordinary life.
There will still be Sundays when you do more. The plan just needs a version that remains usable once the week has started.
Small bits of friction add up
The things that make a routine awkward can look too minor to matter.
The yoga class is a little further away. You need to change clothes. The programme is on an app you have to find. The yoga mat has disappeared. Dinner needs ingredients you do not have.
Each one is manageable on its own. By the end of a busy day, several of them together can use most of the patience you had available.
This is why it is worth looking at everything that happens before the exercise begins. The session may be exactly as demanding as it should be while the route into it has become needlessly fiddly.
A systematic review of 88 studies examined small environmental changes intended to encourage physical activity or reduce sedentary behaviour. Sixty-eight per cent reported an effect while the intervention was present, and 47 per cent of those measuring behaviour after its removal reported an effect then.[2]
Most of the studies concerned prompts encouraging people to use the stairs. It showed that immediate surroundings can affect what people do. If leaving the shoes by the door makes the walk easier to start, there is no particular reason to hide them in a cupboard and hope memory or discipline fills the gap.
The plan may need another look
Plans are made in one set of circumstances and then expected to keep working while our circumstances change.
Work moves around. It rains. The gym changes its timetable. Children have new places they need taking to. Something that fitted easily three months ago can now be the most awkward part of the week.
Research into if-then planning gives us a useful reason to remain modest about the power of a plan. A meta-analysis of randomised trials found the overall effect was low, so implementation intentions did not significantly increase physical activity across the studies as a whole.[3]
The subgroup of studies that reinforced the plans later produced a small significant effect, which means we cannot say that having plans was definitely responsible.
Still, returning to your own plan occasionally makes sense because you can see whether it still fits. You may need to move a session, shorten it, change gyms or simply put the trainers by the door.
There is no scientifically correct timetable for doing this. Look at the plan again when the routine starts becoming difficult to follow, or set a reminder if you know you tend to tolerate that difficulty for months.
The exercise can still be difficult
Making the route into exercise easier does not make the exercise itself easy.
Getting stronger takes effort. The last few repetitions may be uncomfortable because the muscle needs a reason to adapt. Running uphill is tiring because hills are tiring. Learning to swim properly may involve weeks of feeling clumsy.
The journey across town, the missing equipment and the booking system all ask for effort as well, although none of them improves the training. Reducing that surrounding effort leaves you with more time and patience for the thing you came to do.
A simpler routine will not make you enthusiastic every Wednesday, but it gives a fairly normal lack of enthusiasm fewer practical reasons to win.
Remove one thing
Take something you are trying to do regularly and picture yourself halfway through a normal week.
Where does it begin to become a pain?
Maybe it is the journey. Maybe the workout is too long for the time you usually have. Perhaps the healthy lunch relies on shopping for six ingredients the day before.
Choose one of those things and make it easier.
Use the less perfect gym you pass on the way home. Keep a shorter workout for busy evenings. Have a couple of meals you can make without thinking very hard. Put whatever you need somewhere you will see it, and see if it helps.
You do not need to redesign the whole routine every time something goes wrong. One annoying part may be doing most of the damage, and removing it will tell you more than replacing everything and starting again.
Life may slowly put it back. The shoes move, the diary changes and the short workout somehow gathers another six exercises. When that happens, have another look.
Build it for Wednesday
Sunday is useful because it gives you time to think and a bit of enthusiasm to work with. Sunday You may have some very good ideas.
Wednesday You has to live with them.
Most weeks contain several ordinary days when you are neither highly motivated nor completely falling apart. You are busy, slightly tired and still capable of doing something.
Build the routine for that person and Sunday You will appreciate it.
Keep starting.
References
[1] Collado-Mateo, D., et al. (2021). Key factors associated with adherence to physical exercise in patients with chronic diseases and older adults: an umbrella review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(4), 2023.
[2] Landais, L. L., et al. (2020). Choice architecture interventions to change physical activity and sedentary behavior: a systematic review of effects on intention, behavior and health outcomes during and after intervention. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, 17, 47.
[3] Silva, M. A. V. da, et al. (2018). Impact of implementation intentions on physical activity practice in adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized clinical trials. PLOS ONE, 13(11), e0206294.