- [Narrator] Whoo oh, morning Trainiacs.
Just finishing up
(heavy breathing)
with 15 minutes, low cadence around 60 RPM
and heart rate right at the top of Z2, zone two
(heavy breathing)
with the team riding together on Zwift.
(heavy breathing)
It's what makes it go by so much easier.
Of course it's important to stay motivated
because that's what keeps things fun.
As long as we're motivated, we're probably enjoying all
of our endurance training and that's gonna
allow us to push a little bit harder
to reach those super, super peak efforts
so that we can make gains whether it's on the race course,
or just push ourselves into new levels
that we didn't think we were capable of
to make ourselves more confident in life.
Here's the thing though that our entire industry,
whether it's the athletes or the coaches
or the people that are putting out content, get wrong,
they always talk about pushing through motivation.
If you want it bad enough, you've got to work hard.
Rise and grind. Getting up at 4:00 AM.
What they don't talk about is that yeah, that's important,
but having a system that you can use to
A, push through those low moments,
but B, use that low motivation as a tool
for how to guide your training.
Because that's a signal that we have to acknowledge,
and if we don't acknowledge it,
there's going to be problems. So I'm gonna
give you a system for how to push
through low motivation instantly
and how to recognize when you shouldn't
be pushing through that low motivation.
(heavy breathing)
Back in 2019, I actually had the luxury of spending a week
with Sarah and Ben True while we were filming a course
about how to run in triathlon.
And one of the things that they talked
about was, they are both professional athletes.
Ben is one of the best runners in America
and Sarah has been one of the best triathletes in America.
And they said that they tend not to really get involved
with each other's training, but what they do monitor
in each other is what's their motivation level
for getting out the door for the second workout of the day.
If they're lazin' around and spendin' time on social media
and procrastinating, that's an indication
of a little bit of low motivation. In my case, back in 2017,
I was just starting to take triathlon
a little bit more seriously. And the idea was,
you know what? This is going to be the year
that I hire a coach and that I take things
super duper seriously. And what ended up happening
is I got faster over the first several months.
And then I started getting to that point of feeling like
all right, I've got to push through training.
I've got to get up and I've got to be tougher
than this training. I've got to get over it.
And it ended up ending at the final end of the year
after about 15 months of trying to do this
and not being able to push through training
and being depressed because I was so injured,
I was so ill, I was so sick and not wanting
to train whatsoever. I was wondering
if I would ever even return to doing triathlon,
let alone these videos. Sometimes you need to push
through that low motivation to get
through a lot of the workouts.
And tell you this Sarah and Ben didn't become
the world-class athletes that they are
by the second things got tough by going to bed.
No, they push through some of those workouts.
But on the other hand you also need to recognize
when too much is too much. And motivation is one
of the first tools that you can use to balance that.
So in this video, I am going to tell you the steps
that you can take to help keep motivation, nice and high
but the steps that you can also take to make sure
that you are not overcoming motivation
to your own detriment. If you can do both,
you're going to be able to make a lot
of progress and stay healthy. Not just throughout
your training but for the rest of your life.
Let's start off first with the fun stuff.
And this is the four step process that I like
to go through to help keep motivation high.
Even over the past year, while I struggled with motivation
I had some of these four things
in place that helped keep me fairly regular.
The first is to set a scary goal.
And it doesn't have to be so insane
that like you can't even run 5k now
but you want to do a 50 mile trail run.
What I would recommend is setting a goal
that is just a little bit outside
of what you think you're capable of doing.
A good barometer for this is like
take what you think you're capable of now,
And if you think that if you were to do it now
there is literally a 50/50 shot
of you being able to complete it or not.
That's going to motivate you every single day to
take the next few months to make sure
that when you worry about your training getting hard
and should you be doing this? And oh maybe,
I don't want to do this. You're gonna
have that little bit of fear in your head saying,
"Hey, get off the couch. I think it's probably time
to go for a run." The second thing
is to structure your training around groups.
Studies show in my experience like you saw
with me riding with the team this morning is
that when you ride with people,
when you run with people, when you train with people,
it's so much easier to get through those difficult times.
Especially if those people that you are training with
are expecting you to show up at a certain time
because the run starts at 8:30 or 5:45,
or the swim class starts at 4:30 after work.
Whatever it is, you feel accountable
to those people 'cause you don't want to let them down.
This is a really good incentive
to help keep you motivated to show up to those workouts.
So wherever possible join groups
of like-minded people with similar paces
So that you can go and execute your workouts,
while not undoing your workouts,
while having the help of that group
around you to do those workouts.
The third thing is to commit to it publicly.
If you go and state that you have a certain goal
and you tell it to even just one person.
We actually did this with NTK.
When she first started getting into running,
we wrote out a training plan and she was like,
"Oh yeah this previous training plan.
I'm going to try to commit to it."
And then I said, "Here's a trick, tell a friend
that this is the training plan that you're doing.
And text that friend a picture of the plan
that you want to do for the next four weeks.
With how many, as a minimum, workouts you wanna
complete of that plan." We said
that to call it a successful four week training plan,
she had to complete 80% or more of the workouts.
And she had to state this to the friend
that she texted it to and instantly, boom,
she felt accountable to that friend.
And the friend would check in on her every few days
and be like, "So where are you at? How you doing?"
And again, that was being accountable to more people.
So whether you state it in our training app or on Facebook
or just privately to a friend,
share what you want to do with somebody
so that it becomes all of a sudden real.
And then the fourth and final trick is
put something on the line. If you have some sort
of a bet with a friend I can't tell you
the amount of stories that we have got
from people that say, "You know what?
I had a bet with a friend and the bet was
that we would have to run a half marathon.
And then now I'm into Ironmans and I love it."
A perfect example of this are the friends,
Kevin and Lauren, who we've had on our podcast
who do the Instagram page, our triathlon journey.
They are accountable to each other.
They set goals that are slightly scary to them.
They state what they want to do
on social media and to their friends.
So they're accountable to everyone around them.
And I think they have a little bit
of a friendly competition going between the two.
How though do we make sure that if you set that
up and you just slam through motivation that is lagging
a little bit you're not going to become unglued.
The guidelines for using low motivation
as a tool to understand when you should push a little bit
and when you should back off. Again,
there's four things that I think that you can do.
The first thing is to recognize when that low motivation
is also paired with actual physical symptoms.
And the first physical symptom is like actually
taking longer to get out the door for workouts.
So this is like the Sarah and Ben True thing
where they would look at how long does it take them
to get motivated to get out the door for the second workout
of the day. If you're feeling like your motivation is low
and you're just lying down and you are just wanting
a little bit more rest. And then you're like, okay, fine.
I'll just, I just got to go do it. I just got to go do it.
Or you're saying things like, well
I just want to get this race over with.
These are indications that your brain is trying
to play some tricks on your body to make you rest,
to lie down, to do less. And in this case
you should probably listen to it. If it's a chronic thing
that's happening several days in a row.
The second thing is, is this low motivation paired
with something that would be an indication
of a precursor to over-training.
For example, are you sleeping less than seven
and a half hours a night? Are you encountering muscles
that are actually sore the next day frequently?
Are you very busy at work or with home?
And the low motivation is probably an indication
that these things are making it less likely
that your body is going to be able to recover.
So it's a first step of your body trying to slow you
down and saying, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa.
This is getting to be a little bit too much.
So look back at what your life situation is like,
and if it has these factors that are not conducive
to good training then maybe it's time to back off
a third step, if you want to just step it up a notch
and you want to actually get some data to see
if low motivation is low motivation, or you are
actually physically struggling is to use something like HRV.
Now I've talked about aura ring and the whoop strap
in the past or HRV for training, whatever you're using.
What I like to do from all of these things
that measure HRV is strip out the HRV number.
I'll put a link in the description below
to a spreadsheet that you can download for free
just put in your email address.
And what you do is every single day you put in
your HRV reading and you end up measuring
your seven day HRV, your heart rate variability.
The indication of how recovered you are versus
your 30 day HRV. And when your seven day dips
under your 30 day, that's an indication that what's going on
in the previous seven days is a little bit too much.
And what this allows you to do is
it allows you to learn the difference
between low motivation and actual physical struggling.
The fourth step is what happens when you decide
that it is time to back off. How do you deal with this?
Well, forget about what I said at the start
with the outsmarting motivation. Don't think
that you are going to try to outsmart low motivation
because it's like saying you want to
outsmart physical reactions that are occurring in your body.
You're not going to out-think them.
First step is that you can lighten off your train.
Just bring everything down a little bit and see what happens
Quite often, the first thing that happens is that,
well, you feel actually worse.
This is actually an indication
that you need even more rest
next take a look at your training balance.
Are you following roughly the 80 20,
the polarized training method where the vast majority
of your training, roughly 70 to 80% of your training
is at a low intensity or are you more
like a lot of self guided athletes where upwards
of like 60% of your training is at a moderate intensity
and your body's just not able to keep up
so you can go and look at something
like Garmin Connect or whatever training app you have
to see how much time you're spending in each zone.
Finally, you might've just done too much too soon.
Quite often, endurance athletes will tend to jump
into something and then start building
up massive amounts of volume and that
too much too soon ends up creating a response
in the brain like, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, stop.
'cause this is way too much. And take a look.
Have you been building up the amount
of hours that you've been doing each week
or the amount of training intensity?
If that's the number that you look at
or the amount of time spent in higher intensity heart rates
by more than about eight to 10% per week.
And if you've been stepping it up by more than that
That's a ramp rate that a lot of bodies
just have a tough time with. Again,
this is a time to get your training balance, right?
And make sure that your training plan is actually
designed properly. I think that motivation,
both high motivation and low motivation
is such a powerful tool that we are
actually designing our training app
to help people with all of those aspects
of staying motivated while using
those indications of low motivation to
help tailor their training, because
I think it gives us such powerful clues
about how much is too much and how much
we can actually push ourselves.
So if you actually want to get a training plan that has all
of the right training balance, the right ramp rate
and this is all something that you can get at
app.mymotive.com. You can try it free for 14 days.
And if you like it, stick around
we got a heck of a group of Trainiacs
to stay motivated with, see what I did there.
And if you aren't already subscribed Trainiacs,
hit the subscribe button below, stay motivated or rest.
Now, you know, which one's which. Later.