One of the hardest parts of going to the gym and building muscle is finding the motivation every day to actually get up and go. When you’ve had a long day at work/school and you’ve maybe travelled on the bus to get home, all you want to do sometimes is sit down and watch your favourite sitcom (Joey) with some peanut butter toast and a cup of tea (well that’s me anyway). The last thing you’ll want to do is to get up, get changed into your gym kit, make another journey through heavy traffic, and then start lifting weights in a sweaty room with a bunch of other guys for an hour.

Fortunately though there are some ways you can help motivate yourself to make sure you do get up, and other to help ensure that once you actually are at the gym you find the energy and drive you need to have a great and muscle building workout.

One method of motivating yourself to go to the gym each day is to closely monitor your progress. Depending on your goals you can do this either by taking intermittent photographs of your progress (one every month for example), by measuring the size of your biceps/chest/legs and keeping a log of your progress, by measuring the actual size of the weights you’re lifting and keeping a log of that (you can even plot these last two onto a chart to see a trend of improvement hopefully) or by weighing yourself to see how much weight your managing to lose.

Using one of these methods will enable you to see yourself slowly improving which can be a great boost. There’s something highly addictive about making small incremental improvements and as you see yourself getting closer and closer to your goal you should find that you gain an extra amount of determination and focus for your workouts. This also means you’ll get a solid sense of achievement at regular intervals and what will feel like a reward for all your hard work. Not only is this great for you from a psychological standpoint, but the actual noting down of your progress will also help you in other ways – to monitor what’s working and what’s not and help you further tailor your workouts. So really whether you’re experiencing a lack of motivation or not you should be using some form of measurement for your progress.

Once you are measuring your progress you should also be setting goals for yourself. These should be both long-term and short-term and be achievable while not limiting yourself. For example you might say that in one month you want to add half an inch to your biceps but that by the end of the year you want them to be an extra four inches in total. Here, the more goals you set the better – for example if you just set the goal of the extra four inches then it will be a year before you get the feeling that you’ve achieved anything and on off days when training isn’t going well it might seem like you’re never going to accomplish that lofty aim.

Mack LeMouse

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