Everyone is different, but here’s my hack that took me from an overweight, mostly sedentary person to a relatively fit 40 miles per week runner and 7 days/week weight lifter.

1) Remove friction. I am also an enthusiast cyclist, but gearing up and getting my bike ready takes time which gives me plenty of opportunities to reconsider that 50 mile ride in 90F heat. In contrast, getting ready for a run takes me 5 minutes so there’s no much time to find excuses.

2) Get it out of the way first time in the morning before breakfast. There’s this extremely positive feeling when you achieve a goal early. I think it makes the rest of your day feel much easier particularly at work.

3) The Pareto principle. 80% easy effort and 20% intense/hard. I am not completely sold on the science but definitely works for me. I don’t get injured often and I recover faster, which allows me to exercise more often. I guess 70-30 would also work but the idea is the same, just go easy most of the time, you’ll get the same benefits without being sore or in pain.

4) Once in a while (twice a year for me) sign up for an event, a 10K, a half iron man, a bike ride, whatever, and tell everyone about it. Some relatives and friends will held you accountable for it.

5) Find a fitness buddy. Ideally it would be someone you spend lots of time with, your spouse, sister or roommate. In my case is my fiance. This also allows for accountability and moral support because you drag each other on those days you are not feeling like exercising.

6) Track your metrics besides weight. Weight is not the best feedback for motivation. There better feedback metrics like Vo2max and HRV. Get a good tracking device that’s reasonably accurate and easy to use and provides you good history. I use Apple Watch but other ones like Coros are good too.

7) Go to bed early. This is the most difficult one for me. I’m trying to put away my phone by 9 pm and switch to reading in Kindle, but man it is hard!

8) Gear. Don’t buy shitty gear to try out an activity and see if you like it. You won’t like it because you are using shitty gear. Invest in gear that is safe, comfortable and of decent quality. It will make the experience much better and you’ll have more chances of sticking with it.

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__turbobrew__ 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> 7) Go to bed early. This is the most difficult one for me. I’m trying to put away my phone by 9 pm and switch to reading in Kindle, but man it is hard!

It is a lot easier to control when you wake up over when you go to sleep. Set an alarm, always get up when the alarm goes off and eventually you will be tired earlier at night and fall asleep.

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xyzzy_plugh 4 days ago | parent [-]

This is the funniest thing I've read all day. I'm sure I'm not alone in that this reads just like the "don't be not good looking" kind of advice.

If only life were so simple.

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__turbobrew__ 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Sleep — just like looks — is a large part hygiene and related life decisions.

Exercise helps you be more tired, setting an alarm for the same time every day helps you stay more consistent, having a pre bed time routine that doesn’t involve screens helps your brain slow down. There are discrete actionable things which are proven to help with sleep.

My natural tendency is to stay up to 2AM and sleep to 10AM, but with conscious effort — and an internally driven motivation to change — I now get up at 6AM every day.

It was hard and I didn’t get there right away, but lots of worthwhile things in this life are hard.

Honestly I think there is something wrong with either our environment or how we raise our kids, because I see so often that people lack executive function and any ability to manifest change for the better in their life. I don’t blame people for having issues as they stem from their parents, I have lots of personality issues that stemmed from how my parents raised me (the business end of a belt) but I would like if society could take a step back and figure out how we can raise humans who are better in control of their own destiny.

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AppleBananaPie 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm confused how is setting an alarm not simple? It will wake you up.

Equivalents for sleeping are things like head trauma and drugs.

Is the argument the alarm can just be ignored? But even in that case up your alarm game. Lol I must be missing something super obvious

	▲	rkomorn 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I've had to accept that people are just very different when it comes to this. I'm someone who rarely ever wakes up with an alarm (usually I wake up before it and turn it off). I never snooze an alarm either. Alarm goes off, I get up, even if it's hours earlier than usual. Clearly there are people who simply can't actually do this, for whatever reason. For me, the "opposite" holds. The only times I've ever gotten up past 7am regularly are when I had jobs that had shifts that ended past midnight. Otherwise I absolutely cannot stay awake past 10pm consistently. As habits, staying up late for me appears as impossible as getting up early is for my wife.
	▲	balfirevic 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Some people will sleep through alarms, turning them off without remembering it. But more importantly, if your sleep schedule is shifted you might not actually be able to fall asleep when you need to, even if you haven't had enough sleep. After a few days you will be exhausted, fall asleep in the afternoon and take a nice 4 hour nap, leaving you unable to fall asleep until very late, after which the cycle continues.

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nradov 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Great advice. Along those same lines, it can also helpful to sign up for periodic sessions with a coach or personal trainer, and join a club that has regular weekly group workouts. These steps aren't essential but help to sort of shift the default and make it harder to procrastinate.

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balfirevic 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Go to bed early

Why? You have 24 hours in a day no matter when you sleep. How did it help?

	▲	IncreasePosts 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I used to sleep like 2AM-10AM, and something I realized towards the end of that phase of my life was that it was easier to be productive at 9AM than it was at 12AM. And coming downstairs and encountering people who have been awake for 3 hours and are in the "middle" of their day, having done productive things already, was fairly demotivating.