| Inspire!
14 Ideas To Spark Motivation & Keep Your Workouts Working Out
by R. W. Rushing
Now is the winter of our discontent … Our bruised arms hung up for monuments. - Shakespeare
 No matter what the poets say, February is surely Austin’s cruelest month, mixing the memory of our New Year’s desire to get in shape with elemental factors of the wet, cold weather.
Ironically, February is also the month for celebrating love. And while finding an exercise program you love (or at least are a bit smitten with), and will therefore stick with, is certainly the first and possibly most important step in setting and achieving your get-in-shape goals, there are many tips and factors to consider to not only ensure you will keep on keeping on, but to see to it you get better, longer lasting results.
Below are 14 inspiring ideas to spark your motivation during these gloomy days — 14 ways to take care of your body so your body will take care of you.
You started the year with that New Year’s adrenaline: “This is the year I’m really going to do something about my body.” But here it is February and you’re already feeling a little drained. Not yet close enough to summer to be worried about your swimsuit size, and just nasty enough outside to make crashing on the couch with your Tivo backlog of last season’s “Sex and the Cities” seem like the only sensible choice.
Snap out of it! Recruit your creativity to help you along. After all, your most important fitness equipment is your mind.
1. Change your game. When I complain that I can’t find the time to exercise, or don’t have the discipline, it’s usually a sign that I’m bored with my old routine. Do what Olympic athletes do and cross-train. Try something completely different. If you run, try t’ai chi. Bicycle. Try kickboxing. Pick up basketball. Try archery. Skydive. Learn MTV-style dancing at Atomic Dance Factory. Do anything to startle your body and engage your mind.
 2. Commit to showing up. Just go to the gym, to the hike-and-bike trail, to your yoga studio. If you get there and you still really don’t feel like working out, then give yourself a day off. As Woody Allen said, “Eighty percent of success is just showing up.” There have been dozens of times when I didn’t feel like working out. But once I cart my carping body to the gym, Shazam!, I’m Captain Marvel on the bench press. To quote what Robert DeNiro said about auditioning, “You never know till you go” — and look where it got him!
3. Call in reinforcements. Gang up on your excuses with group fitness. You’re not alone in your quest, so make peer pressure work for you. Team fitness can keep you motivated and make you mutually accountable to your new friends, who are also going through the same sweet agony.
It can be hard to find people with identical fitness goals among your personal friends. One way to find both company and commiseration is with a program like the Austin chapter of Team In Training, the largest endurance training program in the United States. Associated with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, this program provides coaching, training and travel opportunities customized to members’ fitness goals. In exchange for training and support, members raise money to go toward a cure for leukemia and lymphoma, the leading killers of people under the age of 35.
The outfit trains up to 180 people during the year from beginners to advanced athletes, says Stephanie Terrell, Team In Training’s Austin marathon manager. Teams meet on Saturday mornings. Each team is professionally coached and sport-specific, covering running, biking and triathlon.
In addition to Austin events, teams are now preparing for marathons in San Diego, Alaska and Lake Tahoe.
 “You’re doing something for yourself, and also giving back to the community for a great cause,” Terrell says.
4. Get some new tunes in your MP3 player. What, you don’t have an MP3 player? Then your workout mood is restricted to whatever music is playing at the gym, whether it’s classic rock or classic rock, or maybe … classic rock?
5. Command yourself. Get in touch with your inner drill sergeant. As Americans, we’re not comfortable with the command tone of voice. It’s not something we’re used to hearing. That’s the very reason why your inner command voice is so effective in accelerating your fitness program. It’s shocking. The best shape I was ever in was in Army basic training, because drill sergeants don’t bother with gentle suggestions.
Try commanding yourself to swim those extra laps, to do that extra set, to go that extra mile, and see what happens. Or let a professional do it — check out Tom Mixon’s Navy SEAL Conditioning Course in Zilker Park, training most weekdays in the early (very early) morning.
6. Sign up for trainers’ training. Even if you have no interest in a fitness training career, earning certification can have a powerful effect on your personal results.
BodyBusiness offers “train the trainer” classes open to everyone for certification by the American Council on Exercise.
“We have several members who go through the program just for their own benefit,” says Jim Martino, BodyBusiness membership director. “The training helps you understand the physiological reasons for what works. Then you can come up with your own programs that work for you.”
Side benefit: once you’re certified, when you’re arguing with your friends about which exercise is best, you’ll have the credentials to prove your point.
7. Change your environment. Almost any gym, yoga studio or martial arts school will give you a free trial week. Or if that simple fix doesn’t re-energize your spirits, try something a bit more outré, like a weekend trip to climb the highest mountain in Texas, or learning to hold your breath under water for three minutes to increase cardiovascular strength and efficiency. Expand your horizons. Even if you don’t like what you find, you’ll go back to your old ways with a new sense of appreciation.
8. Work a muscle you’ve never worked before. We work so hard to develop muscles like abs, glutes and pecs, then we get dressed and cleverly conceal them.
How about toning the most exposed, most used, and most ignored muscles: forearms, hands, neck and calves.
One easy way to keep your hands and forearms strong and toned is to keep a tennis ball or Gripmaster (available at Rooster Andrews) at your desk to pump blood and oxygen to your brain to combat that afternoon slump.
Extra benefit: research shows that working your right hand activates your left brain for problems requiring logic, and vice versa for your right brain’s creative tasks.
9. Get ground up and pounded out. Many fitness activities require some pain. Our body deserves a reward from time to time. And what your body wants more than anything is a massage. Getting worked over feels good for a reason — that after-massage buzz is your body’s way of saying “thank you.”
According to the American Massage Therapy Association, this ancient art increases blood flow and oxygen to all parts of the body and removes wastes and toxins, helpful in relieving muscle aches. Massage can be used to increase endurance, control fatigue and just, well, feel better. Which is kind of the point, right?
“Massage is a great recovery and flexibility tool,” says award-winning masseuse Melissa Gonzales, owner of Austin’s Morning Star Trading Company. “Studies show a 20 percent improvement in performance” for people who use massage as a part of their fitness routine, Gonzales adds.
And massage can be a motivational technique. Gonzales suggests rewarding yourself with a massage after achieving an intermediate fitness goal. For a daily dose, she recommends muscle-relaxing products like natural analgesic muscle warmers scented with lavender or wintergreen, and postworkout aromatherapy bath soaps.
One quick suggestion: a self-massaging roller for your feet. “A little foot massage goes a long way,” Gonzales says.
10.Learn to use calipers. Working hard on your body but not losing weight? It’s common knowledge that you may be losing fat but adding muscle. And you may be drinking and retaining more water. These facts make it impossible to rely on the old bathroom scale. Using a tape measure for your waist, thighs or other target areas is a better.
However, the best way to judge your body fairly and accurately is to check your body fat with inexpensive plastic calipers, available in Austin at Fitness Headquarters. Learning to use the calipers correctly is as much an art as a science and requires hands-on professional help — don’t rely on written instructions. Be sure to find someone who really knows their stuff to help you the first time, and then get a second opinion. Or check out the variety of tests and measuring devices offered at your health club. Many gym members aren’t even aware of the tests offered free of charge to members, or at least they haven’t yet taken advantage of this free service. Once you start measuring your body fat regularly, you’ll have vastly better data to guide your fitness planning.
11. Meditate. The word “inspire” comes from the Latin “to breathe in, to inhale.” Inspire your workout by trying meditation, which among other benefits teaches you breath control. All forms of cardiovascular exercise require some form of breath control, although it’s an unconscious skill for the millions of us huffing and puffing on the elliptical trainer. Proper breathing can be a powerful boost to your endurance.
Meditation also teaches focus, discipline, impulse control and pain management. The best part is, it’s free, and you can do it anytime, anywhere.
12. Skip out. On those days when you don’t feel like doing your usual workout, cut class — remember how fun that was in school? You’ll get that rebellious adrenaline rush.
Substitute an alternate activity for your usual routine. The main thing is to have your “plan B” figured out in advance; when you’re feeling too mopey to workout, you’re not feeling very creative, either.
Hike the Greenbelt. Take a friend and rent a canoe on Town Lake. Or grab the dog and head out for Pedernales Falls, only 20 minutes away. Nature never fails to inspire. You want to find something to surprise yourself with, something that captures your imagination.
13.Secret Weapon. Always keep an ace up your sleeve — or somewhere in those Lycra bike shorts. It could be a favorite song that never fails to kick-start your heart, or a certain exercise that you always feel like doing, even when you can’t contemplate a full-on workout. It could even be something as obvious as running, if you’re not usually a runner.
Paradoxically, some people consider running “the lazy man’s exercise,” because adrenaline takes over within a few hundred yards, whether you feel like running or not. Same with boxing or sparring — it’s hard to feel indifferent when someone’s trying to hit you in your nose.
Warning: use your secret weapon only in case of emergency. Otherwise it gets boring and loses power.
14. Last, in honor of Valentine’s Day — love your body — love yourself. As much as we beat ourselves up about fitness goals and not living up to our own high standards, we’ve got to be gentle with ourselves, too.
Part of developing your fitness is learning to listen to your body and trust what it says. If you’re feeling sluggish, your body may have legitimate gripes about over-training, or uninspiring monotony or inadequate diet.
After all, what are we beating ourselves up about? Are we judging our bodies against an airbrushed photo of a teenage model in a magazine? A model who gets paid to workout every day and rigidly control their diet?
Compare and despair.
If you feel like your self-criticism is getting out of hand, you may want to seek counseling. What’s the point of trying to look better if you don’t feel better?
“We are always expecting to be somewhere other than where we are,” says Austin psychotherapist Larry Higgins.
“If we’re not meeting our self-imposed expectation, we can get really critical — as if being critical will be the motivation,” Higgins says. “Once we’re in that cycle, it’s an insidious loop. There’s no way out.”
Sounds gloomy. What’s the solution?
“We have to accept the fact that we’re being too harsh, and try to learn to be more gentle, to be kind, loving and compassionate with ourselves, just as we’d like other people to treat us,” Higgins says.
“We’re all going to slip out of our diet or exercise plan,” he says, “but it’s hard to get back in the saddle if we’ve beat the horse half to death.”.
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