Obstacles to Fitness
Intrinsic or Extrinsic motivation, which is better?
This post started early this morning upon reading what appeared to be either:
a frustrated person trying to drum up business
or
someone who thinks that scaremongering and criticism ...
...are great ways to get people to change their behaviour.
It made me wonder why those tactics don't work with fitness and health.
We are complicated beings with wants and needs. When the media says "It's simple, we need to eat less and move more", that's not very helpful. We do want to get fitter and agree that it is worth paying a trainer for expert training. But we also want and need to spend our time and money elsewhere. It's simply not yet a high enough priority. I could go on to explain the benefits to your long term health of exercising, but we all know these already but it's still not enough to make my phone ring off the hook with prospective clients.
When working with a client, both of us need to understand what's going to motivate them to keep turning up and training. Is the reward internal or external? Which is better at motivating? For example, the two type of motivator I often see:
An intrinsic motivator might be feeling confident and more desirable.
An extrinsic motivator might be going on holiday or wearing a certain outfit.
You're still going to be able to go on holiday or wear an outfit (even if it's not the outfit) even if you're not fitter and toned, so it's not a great motivator. Also, what about after the holiday or event? Where's the motivation to reach the goal?
A Faster Trainer, like me, spends a long time understanding these factors when training a client. If I get the motivation and feelings during and after sessions right, you'll keep moving to your rewards. You'll achieve them and more.
You can have all the lattes, scroll on your phone to your heart's content AND still enjoy working out with me - you don't have to give up anything, exercise should be something you should enjoy and want to do in addition to everything else.