It’s that time of the year when most people feel super-motivated to exercise in order to lose some weight for summer. But this enthusiasm can dip occasionally. How do we stay motivated?  Here are my 10 tips to reboot your mood and keep the fitness journey on track. You don’t need to apply all the techniques listed below. Just start out with the tips you believe will have the most impact in keeping you motivated.

1. Think of all the benefits of exercise

Exercise not only helps us reach and maintain a healthy body weight, it also has a whole lot of other benefits, both physical and mental benefits. It lowers blood pressure, strengthens bones, helps battle depression, improves energy levels, increases mental focus, elevates mood, increases a sense of control over your life, improves self-esteem, reduces the chances of various diseases and slows down aging.

The more benefits you can identify with the more motivated you are to exercise.

In my quest to get a bikini body before summer actually hits (if it ever does with all this rain!) I started going to a woman’s only boxing class.  At first I had reservations about doing boxing as a sport for a few reasons.

1.         Isn’t Boxing is a boys sport? 2.         Do I really want to do a sport that is based on punching people? 3.         Will I be any good at it? 4.         Isn’t boxing just an arm and shoulder workout and not much fitness? 5.         Is boxing similar to Kick-Boxing, which I had tried and always felt really uncoordinated at?

I decided to give it a go, because I can’t really answer any of those questions without actually going to a class!  I was quite nervous the first time I decided to venture down to the class, because I was worried that I would look stupid and not know what I was doing, but that is what the trainers are for.

Lots of people always ask me when the best time of the day to exercise is and for most people the answer is whenever you can get up the motivation to do it is the best time.  When you are first starting out with an exercise regime the most important thing is to actually “do” exercise on a regular basis!  Continuous cardiovascular exercise, such as walking, jogging, stair climbing, or cycling, sustained for at least 30 minutes, will burn body fat no matter when you do it.. But saying that there is a “best time” of the day to exercise and this is what I am going to talk about and list the extra benefits of training at this time.

So if your goal is to get the maximum benefits possible from every minute of your weight loss exercise then you should consider getting up early and doing some cardio before you eat your first meal of the day.  Even if you are not a morning person you will still get the same benefits out of this type of exercise and you would be surprised how quickly you start to wake up before the alarm clock goes off each morning.

There are three advantages of early morning exercise versus doing the same later in the day.