Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us pdfdrive com

The Type I Fitness Plan: Four Tips for Getting (and Staying) Motivated to Exercise

On the jacket of this book is a runner—and that’s no accident. Running can have all the elements of Type I behavior. It’s autonomous. It allows you to seek mastery. And the people who keep at it, and enjoy it most, often run toward a greater purpose—testing their limits or staying healthy and vital. To help you bring the spirit of intrinsic motivation out of the office and classroom and into another realm of your life, here are four tips for staying fit the Type I way.
Set your own goals. Don’t accept some standardized, cookie-cutter exercise plan. Create one that’s tailored to your needs and fitness level. (You can work with a professional on this, but you make the final calls.) Equally important, set the right kinds of goals. Ample research in behavioral science shows that people who seek to lose weight for extrinsic reasons—to slim down for a wedding or to look better at a class reunion—often reach their goals. And then they gain the weight back as soon as the target event ends. Meanwhile, people who pursue more intrinsic goals—to get fit in order to feel good or to stay healthy for their family—make slower progress at first, but achieve significantly better results in the long term.