Tag Archives: exercise habits

Habit Change Planning—the Plan D Way

Cheryl Cope Posted on by

What is Plan D habit change planning? It is contingency planning for your habit change issue. You brainstorm possible obstacles or likely hindrances that could stop you from succeeding with your specific habit change goal.

For example, let’s suppose you have decided to go to your local fitness club on a certain day of the week to work out. What if your car won’t start? What if the club is unexpectedly closed? What if the school calls and you have to go pick up your sick child at the exact time you had your workout scheduled?

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Improvement Goals for Your Exercise Program

Cheryl Cope Posted on by

An improvement goal in general is getting better, doing more, working harder, developing new skills, learning something new. Some examples of improvement goals are to walk one more minute, do 5 more crunches than the day before, learning a new stroke in your favorite sport or trying out a new piece of exercise equipment.

Improvement goals are not as rigid and general as making a goal to exercise three times a week for 60 minutes each time or setting a short time frame to say, run a marathon. Unless you are already in the habit of exercising very closely to those goals, then you are setting yourself up for failure.

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When is Something Truly a Habit?

Cheryl Cope Posted on by

Can you call something a “habit” if, when your routine is disrupted, the “habit” gets neglected?

I don’t think so. Habits aren’t habits unless they have become almost automatic. If something as small as a routine change stops a habit then it wasn’t a habit at all.

That’s bad news for me. I’ve been trying to instill the habit of more and better exercising into my life since January and a recent trip out of town totally broke down my “habit” into almost nothing. I mean, even after getting back home I’ve been really struggling to get even close to what I was doing before I went on this little trip.

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