How to motivate yourself

One of the greatest enemies in a training is to lose your motivation. As you all know by now, training is a long term commitment. For example, you may be very motivated to lose 20 pounds by the beginning of the year, but only to get lazy half-way through when you yet to see any concrete results.

Here are some of my personal favourite tips to keep yourself motivated in your workout:

Make a bet
Make a friendly bet with friend or family. Whoever drops 10 pounds first is the winner. For a more effective motivation make a bet with a rival or someone you particular don't like losing to.

Sign up for competition
Signing up for a competition would give you a deadline to reach a specific goal. The thought of competing with so many people looking could give you extra motivation to perform.

Join a community
Participating in a forum, club would make your workouts more interesting. You can also gain experience, ideas and activities that would increase your workouts.

Keep it interesting
Repetition of the same workout can be dull and boring. Change your weights, a change of exercise can keep your workouts interesting. Instead of doing regular push-ups, challenge yourself for a knuckle push-up. Even varying the speed of your sit-ups could keep you motivated for the workout session.

Get a workout partner
Besides having a companion, you can also learn through each other. Having someone to talk to can go a long way working out in the gym.

Visualize your goals
Look at the mirror, and visualize the perfect you. Do this everyday and work towards your goal.

Keep your progress
Keep track of your progress, write down how much weights you can lift, weights you've lost, body fat etc. When you start seeing results, you would be motivated to continue.

Challenge yourself
Instead of doing the same workout routine over and over again, challenge yourself to a task. You can challenge yourself to bench-press 250 pounds in two months, do 10 consecutive chin-ups in week.

There are many more other methods that could work for you, but most importantly as long as you have the will you will definitely reach your goal.