Why We Quit Our Exercise Plans And What We Can Do About It | Simon Long | TEDxLoughboroughU

so today I'd like to talk to you about why we quit our exercise programs and what we can do about it before I get into that though I'd like to give you a little bit of background so during my early 20s I was diagnosed as clinically obese I was 36 percent body fat I was not happy and I felt that I tried absolutely everything to achieve long-term weight loss but nothing had helped so what I did is I went back to the drawing board and I discovered a new method a new approach that I could use for the problem and by applying this new approach I managed to take myself down from 36 percent body fat to 6.5 now this not only happened quickly but more importantly it happened sustainably and what I'd like to do with you today is describe to you a couple of the things I learnt on that journey before we get into that though it's important that you realize that it's well identified with in scientific literature that long-term weight loss is quite rare of the people who do lose weights on a weight loss intervention on average if you go back to those individuals four or five years later they will have managed to keep off about three kilos seven pounds worth of that weight and what we need to do is we need to ask ourselves why this is the case because we understand the principles of a good diet and we understand the importance of exercise which is the focus of today's talk so why is it that we quit our weight loss programs why do we quit our exercise programs and the answer quite simply is boredom if you don't enjoy what you are doing if you don't find it deeply exciting you are never going to keep doing it for the turn eventually you will become bored and you will quit so what we need to ask ourselves is if this is the case with all of the workouts the training programs the personal trainers etc they exist who is the best person for us to turn around to and decide what we should be doing in our exercise programs and the answer is you nobody else is in a better position to know what you would enjoy and what you would find fun then you are yourself now you may well say to yourself to be fair I don't really know what constitutes as exercise I know jogging I know press-ups I don't enjoy either of them and my answer to that would be that the following is the definition of exercise it is a movement or activity which requires physical effort so all of the traditional ways of exercise do fall into this so gym going for a jog playing sports and if you enjoy any of those then great you can use them but what also falls under this category is far more fun activities such as having a play fight with your kids throwing a ball for a dog going out dancing grabbing a stick and having a pretend sword fight with your partner all count under this definition of exercise let's give you an idea of how individualized and how silly these choices can be for myself I really enjoy carrying heavy shopping bags I understand it's a little bit weird but for me I really enjoy the challenge of trying to carry heavy shopping bags so whenever I go to the supermarket every single week I'll park my car at the far end of the car park and I'll attempt to walk all of my carrier bags all of my week shopping from the tills all the way to my car now I've never made it yet but I deeply enjoy the challenge of trying to get there and because I enjoy it I'm not going to quit it and so I get a guaranteed ten minutes worth of exercise every single week just from that so what we need to do is now we realize that we are the best person to choose our exercises and that exercise is not a restrictive term is we need a framework that we can use to decide what exercises we would actually enjoy and find fun and that framework comes from psychology and it's called self-efficacy now self-efficacy is your self belief that you can be successful within a given situation now this is important because if you believe you can be successful within an activity you are far more likely to enjoy that activity meaning you are far less likely to quit it now self-efficacy is built from three fundamental pillars which I'm going to describe for you now and the first of these is choice because as we said nobody is in a better position to decide what you will enjoy and what you will find exciting then you are yourself the second is ability now ability is not required right at the beginning because the journey to gaining competence within an activity is actually quite motivational in itself but eventually you will need to learn competence and ability else you will become frustrated you will become bored your endurance will wane and you will quit now the third element is relatedness and relatedness is the easiest of the three to tick off because it's essentially there in the title relatedness is relative so for example maybe you decide to use fencing as your chosen sport now this could be because you need to defend your spouse's honor alternatively you might want to get involved in battle reenactments but possibly you just watch Game of Thrones and you think sword fights are cool all of these will allow you to relate to the activity now of the three the most important the one we must focus on is choice because as we said relatedness is relative ability can be gained but choice has far less gray area you would either choose to do an activity or you wouldn't and if you don't choose an activity the fundamental foundations of you being able to build your self-efficacy are already not present now as we said you can build your belief in your ability and you will need to build your belief in your ability to build your enjoyment with inactivity and this is done using three different bricks the first of these bricks is experience or mastery and this is essentially practice makes perfect the more you do an activity the greater your belief in your ability to successfully perform that activity the second is modeling now as an example for modeling perhaps you decide that you would like to use ballroom dancing as your chosen activity but you cannot dance to save your life but you watch Strictly Come Dancing and in week one there's a contestant on there who also cannot dance but by week six they're absolutely nailing the foxtrot and what we do is we look at them and we think huh okay they started the same as me they had no ability whatsoever but they managed to learn to become competent and if they can do it why can't I now the third brick is that of praise now praise can either come internally so you can tell yourself that you did a good job there or it can be come from externally so maybe a partner or a loved one or a coach says to you that you did a good job now by using these three bricks we can build our ability build our belief in our ability which it's been proven multiple times within scientific literature under the theory of self-determination the activities that we have self-efficacy within so those that we have ability in that we choose and then we can relate to we will internalize our motivation for now this is absolutely imperative to your adherence because nearly everybody starts in external motivation an external motivation could be a reward I'll buy myself X if I achieve gold Y and it can also be pressure now this can be self pressure for instance you may have a holiday coming up and you think I want to lose some weight because I want to look incredible when I'm strutting down the beach but alternatively it can come commonly from external pressure which could be your partner putting pressure on you to do some exercise because they worry about your health now external motivation works perfectly well for short-term goals but for long-term goals is completely useless so what we need to do is we need to build ourselves from external motivation using the principles of self-efficacy until we reach internal motivation and the reason that this is so powerful is because if somebody asks you why you do an activity do you have internal motivation for your answer will be because I love it because I have a deep enjoyment from it and even activity you deeply enjoy the chances of you quitting that activity are greatly reduced now there is one other element can lead to boredom that I would like to discuss with you today and that is repetition if you repeatedly keep doing the same activity regardless of how much you love it eventually it will start to grind on you and you will find that you get bored your dierence wanes and you quit now the way we want to beat this is by creating variety within our training programs and so I suggest that you grab a piece of paper you grab a pen and you sit down and you brainstorm every single activity you can think of do you either have self-efficacy within or you could build self-efficacy in now you may well only be able to come up with one or two different activities or you may wish to further expand the list of activities that you create and the way that we do this is from another principle which is called self-efficacy transference and this is essentially taking your self belief from what activity and moving it to related activities now how you relate activities is highly individual it depends on your own thought processes but I'm going to give you a bit of an example this individual has decided to use ballroom dancing is their chosen activity now they very much enjoy it but over time it starts to become a little bit repetitive and a little bit boring so what they think to themselves is okay ballroom dancing requires me to be in control of my own body I need to perform predetermined movements and I need to have good balance and these are all also elements that you find in martial arts so I'm going to give karate ago they try out karate they love that as well and what they realize later down the line is that both of these initial sports or these activities require them to be in control of their own body their own body weight so they start to use bodyweight training press ups squats lunges and the like and as their confidence begins to increase with the bodyweight training they start to add external weights such as barbells dumbbells things like this moving them into weighted resistance training noise you can see through fairly logical steps we've had a Lost in Translation effect where we've gone from ballroom dancing all the way through to weight training now as I said the way that you do this will be highly individual to you but if you apply this principle of self efficacy transference you will find that you end up with a huge spider diagram filled with activities the you either have self-efficacy within or within which you can build self-efficacy and this will allow you to create variety around your training programs meaning you're far less likely to get bored and you're dierence is likely to stay a lot higher which will allow you to reach your goals so in summary of what we've spoken about today number one you are the best person to choose what exercise and activities you would like to do keeping in mind that exercise is not a restrictive term number two those exercises that you will enjoy are the ones within which you choose you have ability and you can relate to and number three you can beat boredom through repetition by using self-efficacy transference to take yourself belief from one activity to closely related activities now I sincerely hope the what I've described today is going to be able to make a positive impact on somebody's life because ever since I was introduced to Ted at quite a young age I don't actually think I could quantify the number of talks that have watched that have made me into the man who stands before you today in terms of my belief my behaviors my abilities my processes and my approaches and I'm truly grateful to have been given the opportunity to stand up here today to share my own idea and hopefully to make a difference to somebody else's life I thank you for your time and I hope you have a wonderful day [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 53,922

Rating: 4.8896046 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United Kingdom, Health, Achievement, Body, Change, Life, Life Development, Nutrition, Obesity, Self, Self improvement, Self-help

Id: WJzFhYBSKLc

Length: 16min 15sec (975 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 13 2016