Tag: rewards

cycling · Sat with Nat

Nat never bothered much about workout tokens or achievements but she kind of likes them?

natalieh (she/her)1 Comment

Recommended soundtrack: Gold by The Beaches

Maybe it’s fear of failure. Maybe it’s about being the fat chick at the back of the pack. Maybe my brain is full of metrics for my paid work. I never cared much for tracking fitness metrics. Steps. Sure. My phone does that.

But the Apple Watch ring thing? My partner LOVES IT. It’s his hit of happy to chase and win fitness challenges. Me, not so much.

Nat smiles at the camera. She has a blue v-neck t-shirt on and feels challenged enough just to show up to life these days.

But it turns out I do like little achievements. Peloton measures so many aspects and has so many little milestones it’s hard to go a week without getting a few.

Since I’m not chasing them it feels a bit random when a whole class high gives me. Huh. Wonder why? Oh that was my 75th ride. Hilarious!

Nat’s achievement dashboard with some tokens including gold and bronze monthly activity challenges. You can follow her as MadNatters if you’d like to. She high fives the heck out of everyone.

The workout minutes is fun to see how little choices add up. In March, on the 31st I finished a Power Zone ride and checked if I hit Gold for cycling distance. Nope! Just under 4km short. Sooooo I DEFINITELY did a 10 minute cooldown ride instead of 5 minutes to hit the distance. Why? It felt achievable and it was the first month that felt that way. Cool!

More than the little badges, I’ve been able to cycle hard enough to get sweaty. Finally!

I’m riding longer, easily hitting an hour in the saddle. I’m able to do rides on back to back days. No more glute or tail bone pain. Amazing!

I also have a personal rule, are we doing the class at the same time? You get a high-five. You hit a milestone? High-five! You pass me on the leaderboard? You hecking bet you are getting a high-five. And when I get a high-five it feels just a bit like being out on a group ride. And that feels AMAZING.

fitness · motivation

New strategy: Using activity and workouts as a reward

Tracy I2 Comments

Image description: colour cartoon style drawing of a gold star with a red, blue, and green striped trail behind it and three white four-pointed stars in the background.
Image description: colour cartoon style drawing of a gold star with a red, blue, and green striped trail behind it and three white four-pointed stars in the background.

I’ve long found it interesting that working out, something that makes me feel so good and that for so many of us falls squarely into the category of “leisure,” is so difficult to motivate ourselves to do sometimes. We complain about having no time. We gripe about the weather. We are (often legitimately) too tired. And yet on the other side of it, many of the activities we do are enjoyable additions to our lives.  Luxuries even.

I’m a big believer in strategizing ways of developing new attitudes or tricks to get me to do things that I in some larger sense want to do but for some bewildering reason also avoid or resist doing. Working out falls into that camp for me from time to time, and I’ve incorporated a number of “life hacks” to get me moving. I’ve blogged about quite a few of them: working out with friends, working out with a trainer, working with a coach.

But my latest is a really simple head game. Now, I know it’s hard to play games with yourself because you kind of know what you’re up to. But it’s working. The game: use workouts as rewards for doing other things that I’m avoiding. Imagine: the workout as a carrot not a stick.

As I mentioned the other day in my post about friends and mutual motivation, we all have things we don’t want to do. For most academics who teach, grading is that thing. And ’tis the season! I have found that I can push through a stack of papers if I know that, at the end of it, I get to go for a run or a training session or a yoga class.

We all have those things that we avoid or procrastinate over. And when we compare working out to one of those things, suddenly a 45 minute run or 60 minutes in the weight room or sweating it out in the hot yoga studio seem like the pleasures they are.

If you struggle with motivation to get your activities into your life, try treating them as rewards for completing the tasks that you tend to avoid.

Do you treat activity as a reward or a punishment? If you’re new to treating it as a reward, give it a try and let me know how it goes! So treat yourself to a workout! You deserve it.