Wednesday, January 11, 2006
A new motivation scheme
If there were any regular readers of this blog, they would have noticed that my SO and I have not been exercising regularly (and have been failing to meet our goals). Neither of us is terribly happy about this, but the inertia of not exercising has proven to be great.
So, we've decided that setting a new long-term goal and developing a new motivation system might help. Here's our new plan:
1) We now have only one long-term goal: to exercise at least 150 times this year.
2) To help motivate us to reach this goal (and encourage us to go beyond it), we're going to give ourselves monetary rewards for exercising.
Here are the details of our plan (yes, we've made rules ... we're geeks; what do you expect?)
1) Exercise at least 150 times this year
This goal is intended to encourage us to be more active, and thus any style of exercise that lasts for a decent duration will count towards the total. Our initial thoughts are that any of our exercise videos, or any other physical activity that lasts a decent while, will count towards the total. The idea here is to encourage us to be physically active, not to get us to look like gym bunnies (we're trying to be realistic here).
2) Rewards for exercising
For every time that one of us does serious exercise (>30 minutes in a day, at least moderate intensity), we will allocate $5 to an account that the exerciser can use to purchase a reward. Short or light-intensity exercise bouts (e.g., A.M. Yoga, Pure and Simple Stretch) will add $2.50 to the account. Here are some examples:
$5 exercise:
Additionally, one of the contributing factors to us getting off track was that we stopped posting some of our exercise to the blog, primarily because the exercise (walking 40+ minutes) wasn't especially intense (see this post for more). This ended up causing us to lose track of whether we were meeting our goals. So, from now on we'll post all of our goal-related exercise to the blog, regardless of how puny it may seem.
And, once again, we invite all of our (nonexistent) readers to help us out by bugging us whenever we fall off the wagon. We heard from only one person when we stopped exercising last fall, and they didn't even bug us much ... we know you can do better!
So, we've decided that setting a new long-term goal and developing a new motivation system might help. Here's our new plan:
1) We now have only one long-term goal: to exercise at least 150 times this year.
2) To help motivate us to reach this goal (and encourage us to go beyond it), we're going to give ourselves monetary rewards for exercising.
Here are the details of our plan (yes, we've made rules ... we're geeks; what do you expect?)
1) Exercise at least 150 times this year
This goal is intended to encourage us to be more active, and thus any style of exercise that lasts for a decent duration will count towards the total. Our initial thoughts are that any of our exercise videos, or any other physical activity that lasts a decent while, will count towards the total. The idea here is to encourage us to be physically active, not to get us to look like gym bunnies (we're trying to be realistic here).
2) Rewards for exercising
For every time that one of us does serious exercise (>30 minutes in a day, at least moderate intensity), we will allocate $5 to an account that the exerciser can use to purchase a reward. Short or light-intensity exercise bouts (e.g., A.M. Yoga, Pure and Simple Stretch) will add $2.50 to the account. Here are some examples:
$5 exercise:
- Walking for 40+ minutes
- Gardening for 60+ minutes
- Body Basics
- Fat Burning Workout
- Yoga for Strength
- Yoga for Beginners
- Walking to the grocery store (and lugging back groceries)
- Gardening for 30-59 minutes
- A.M. Yoga
- P.M. Yoga
- Pure and Simple Stretch
Additionally, one of the contributing factors to us getting off track was that we stopped posting some of our exercise to the blog, primarily because the exercise (walking 40+ minutes) wasn't especially intense (see this post for more). This ended up causing us to lose track of whether we were meeting our goals. So, from now on we'll post all of our goal-related exercise to the blog, regardless of how puny it may seem.
And, once again, we invite all of our (nonexistent) readers to help us out by bugging us whenever we fall off the wagon. We heard from only one person when we stopped exercising last fall, and they didn't even bug us much ... we know you can do better!
Labels: goals
