I get inspiration from a lot of people. One of those people is Elliott Hulse, a strongman
and YouTuber who's simple, no frills style of teaching, and very minimalistic editing
of his videos gave me the confidence that I actually needed to start making videos without
thinking that I needed insane editing and huge budgets and all of the crazy stuff that
a lot of other channels use. If you watched the trailer over his channel
Strength Camp, you'll hear him say something that has become the cornerstone of my own
exercise philosophy. It's, "The most important part of the game is your game piece." It
makes sense, doesn't it? If your life is a game and the hardware you play with is your
body and your mind, and if they're not in good working order, you're not going to be
able to play the game very well. I make this point for an important reason
is this, as students who are busy and who are young, we make a couple of really fiendish
excuses in our lives when it comes to exercising. One, we say that we're young. Our bodies are
going to take care of themselves. We don't need to take care of them as much. It's not
as much of a priority. Two, we feel that we're too busy to make time for exercise, that it
can come later after we put in all this grant work to become successful.
If you've made those excuses before or you're making other excuses that caused you to work
out less than you want to, then I'm here to help you squash those excuses. In this video,
I want to help you do two things. One, make more time to work out. Two, gain the motivation
to do so. Let's start with time. The first thing I'm going to say is the same thing I
said in my video on High-Density Fun. You need to schedule time to exercise. I'm
not talking about just saying, "Oh, I'm going to work out three times this week at some
point." Use the time management skills you're building, and actually look at your week.
Schedule actual times that you're going to work out, and make sure you're in the gym
or wherever you work out at those times. Just like scheduling fun, scheduling your
exercise time will necessitate that you work more efficiently when you're actually studying
or getting homework done. If you're finding that becoming a more efficient person and
scheduling your workouts isn't enough and you're really, really busy, then do what I
do. Every morning I wake up, and as part of my morning routine, I do something called
the 7-minute workout. It's actually just seven minutes, and I use an app on my iPhone to
guide me right through, which I'll link to into the blog post for this video.
It's part of my little 10-minute block with my meditation that I do for three minutes.
The nice thing about the 7-minute workout is that it's all body weight exercises. I
actually do it right here in this office. I don't need anything except for my body weight
and a wall to do wall sits, and a chair to do chair stand up exercise things. I'm not
really sure those are called chair step ups. Let's move on to the topic that most people
probably have more trouble with, which is motivation. I've got four ways that you can
increase your motivation to exercise. Get a buddy. Externalize your motivation. Tackle
the ignition costs first, and make exercise fun. Getting a workout buddy is seemingly
simple. You just find your friend who also wants to exercise, and go to the gym with
them. One thing I want to caution you on this is
you need to find somebody who is not going to bring your own motivation levels down.
If you find that the person who wants to go to the gym with you is actually making it
harder for you to get to the gym than it would be on your gym, then go to the gym with that
person unless you want to make a conscious effort to help them get fit.
If you're trying to bolster your own motivation, you need to find somebody who is going to
provide a positive influence. One thing you can try is actually getting a buddy who isn't
really a good friend. I found my workout buddy when I was on the Iowa state subreddit one
year. We ended up going to the gym together for six months.
Since I didn't know him really well, I couldn't just walk into his room and say, "Hey, I'm
not feeling it today." I had to show up if I didn't want to embarrass myself. Actually,
having a workout buddy is one way you can externalize the motivation to work out. Let's
talk about a couple of others. Basically, externalizing your motivation is going to
come through commitment devices. Committing prior to the actual workout so
you have to go do it. One way I did it as a sophomore was signing up for an ROTC physical
fitness class. As a civilian, I actually worked out with the army cadets, and did the exact
same workouts they did at 6:00 AM. Yes, it was hell, but I was really fit that semester.
In later semesters, I've signed up for a lifting class, which we met three days a week. While
it wasn't at 6:00 AM, it was a really good way to stay in shape.
I got an extra credit to boot. If you don't have access to a workout partner or classes
you can sign up for, you can also use apps as commitment devices. I'm going to talk about
some of the other apps I really like at the end of this video, but the ones I want to
talk about right now are Beeminder and Gym-Pact. Beeminder, I've talked about before. It's
a general commitment device app, where you can pledge money towards a certain goal.
Gym-Pact is an exercise-specific goal where you pledge money to go to the gym on certain
amount of times a week. The third on our motivation list is dealing with ignition costs. Tell
me if you feel the same way that I do. I think that the actual act of getting ready to work
out, putting on my gym clothes, taking up my regular clothes, and walking to the gym
is actually more difficult than the actual act of lifting the weights.
This is a common problem for a lot of things we want to do. The act of preparation of getting
ourselves into the task and getting ready for it is often harder to summon the motivation
for than doing the actual task. To account for this, there are a couple of things you
can do. The first thing I would do is split it into two different tasks. Respect the ignition
costs as a task of its own, and then the actual workout as a second task.
If you keep something like an accomplishment journal or you track your task in HabitRPG,
and give yourself rewards, then give yourself a reward for finishing the ignition and then
give yourself a second reward for doing the actual workout. You can also put that secondary
task, the actual workout, out of your mind altogether, and simply commit to finishing
the ignition. I know a lot of people who say to themselves,
"I'm just going to walk into the gym with gym clothes on, and count that as a win if
I can do it." Once they're actually in the gym, they are already there, so their mind
goes, "What the heck! I'm going to work out." I won't go into it too much here, but this
is an example of B.J. Fogg's Tiny Habits Model. If you want to learn more about it, I'll probably
do a video in the future, but I'll also link to some resources in the blog post for this
video. The last thing I want to mention about motivation
before I talk about apps is the act of finding ways of exercising that are actually fun.
A lot of people think exercising and working out is strictly limited to jogging in the
treadmill or going to the gym and lifting weights. If that's not something you enjoy,
you're probably not going to do it no matter how much motivation you try to summon, or
at least you're not going to do it as often as you want.
Regardless of the schedule you set up for actual traditional working out, find something
you enjoy, and augment your exercise schedule with that. If you're in college, there are
probably a bazillion intramural sports leagues you can join. You can go hiking, or you can
do what I do and play lots and lots of DDR. Before we finish this video and I�ll tell
you to get off your butt and hit the gym, let's talk about a couple of apps that can
help you keep motivated to exercise. Now, I talk a lot about HabitRPG in this channel
because I really like it for general habit building, but I've actually modify it and
turned into a workout tracker as well for my own uses.
If you take a look at my habits column, I have a couple of standard habits there that
I track. For the most part, I list individual exercises, and give myself credit when I get
them done in the gym. If you want to take this concept a step further, then check out
Fitocracy. I used to use fitocracy all the time, and it's basically the best way to turn
exercise into a video game that I've never seen.
By tracking the sets and wraps you do, you can get experience. You level up, and you
can also get achievements and go on quests. It's actually pretty similar to HabitRPG,
but its focused on exercise. The last one I'll mention is an app called Fitness Buddy,
which my friend Yungtown told me about. If you're looking for an app that will give you
specific workout routines and also show you how to do specific exercises, it's an amazing
resource. All right, I hope this video will help you
create more time and motivation to exercise more in college, because seriously, having
your body and mind in good working order is the foundation to being able to use all the
other techniques I talked about on this channel. If you have other tips and things that have
worked for you that I didn't mention in this video, then feel free to share them down in
the comments. I will see you next week. Hey there, thanks for watching my video on
exercising more in college. I know this video is a bit of a departure from the specific
study strategies I usually talked about in this channel, but if you liked it and you
want to get more tips on being an awesome college student, then hit that big red subscribe
button right there. I also wrote a free 100-plus-page book on
getting better grades. If you would like to get a copy, click the picture of the book,
and I'll send you one. You can also find links to any resources I mentioned in the video
by going to the companion blog post right there. If you missed last week's video, there�s
a clip of it playing so definitely check it out.
Lastly, if you want to suggest topics for new videos or just connect with me, then I'm
@TomFrankly on Twitter or you can leave a comment. Thanks.