Motivation in Health and Fitness

May 26, 2025

shallow focus photo of black SLR camera on white wooden shelf — Photo by Cristofer Maximilian on Unsplash

I had a recent conversation with a friend about working out and nutrition, and he said that I’m very disciplined and motivated. I said thanks, but I think it comes down to the habits and systems I have in place. I don’t really see it as discipline or motivation. Actually, I’ve tried to set my system up so that it doesn’t require much of either one.

Still, it made it consider the roles of discipline and motivation in health and fitness. We can have the best practices, habits, and systems in place, but I suppose we still need some modicum of discipline and motivation to stick to them.

We all know people who seem very motivated about their health and those who don’t seem to be motivated at all, so what’s the difference? What are motivation and discipline as factors in our health and fitness?

The answers get into some psychology.

Health and fitness come down to a good deal of it (psychology, that is), and it’s easy to overlook this connection. In fact, there are entire subfields that focus on the psychology of health, sport, and exercise, so much so that the American Psychological Association recognizes them:

Exercise psychology: “A combination of exercise science and psychology used to study the psychological circumstances and consequences of involvement in exercise.”1
Health psychology: “The subfield of psychology that focuses on the examination of the relationships between behavioral, cognitive, psychophysiological, and social and environmental factors and the establishment, maintenance, and detriment of health.”2
Sport psychology: “The application and development of psychological theory for the understanding and enhancement of human behavior in sport.”3

The definition of health psychology nails it with “the relationships between behavioral, cognitive, psychophysiological, and social and environmental factors…”

Our health is a complicated matrix; it’s a function of the interplay, the crosstalk, and the ebbs and flows between all and each of these factors, but it fundamentally comes down to the cognitive aspects, which the other areas influence.

Among the cognitive factors, motivation is a primary area of focus, and like health psychology has become a major subfield, motivation has similarly become a major sub-subfield. Motivation is important because it’s a key factor for long-term consistency and adherence to exercise, and thus to improve health and fitness.

One review article explores motivation towards exercise and physical activity, also through a lens of psychology.4 “The physical activity participation data indicate that many people are either unmotivated (or amotivated), having no intention to be more physically active, or are insufficiently motivated in the face of other interests or demands on their time.

“In addition to those who are unmotivated,” the authors continue, “another source of short-lived persistence in exercise behaviors comes from people who do express personal motivation to exercise regularly, yet initiate exercise behaviors with little follow through.” Such people, they say, may have “controlled” motivations, where they feel like they “have to” exercise and eat well instead of “wanting to”. Moreover, these are “types of externally-driven motivation that may not lead to sustained activity.”

Specifically, this review looks at extrinsic and intrinsic motivation by way of self-determination theory.

“Intrinsic motivation is defined as doing an activity because of its inherent satisfactions. When intrinsically motivated the person experiences feelings of enjoyment, the exercise of their skills, personal accomplishment, and excitement.”

In contrast, “extrinsic motivation refers to doing an activity for instrumental reasons, or to obtain some outcome separable from the activity per se. For example, when a person engages in an activity to gain a tangible or social reward or to avoid disapproval, they are extrinsically motivated.”

With exercise, an example of intrinsic motivation is doing something that you actually like doing and not doing it because you feel like you have to or should. For me, I enjoy doing the major compound movements: squats, deadlifts, bench presses, and overhead presses. I think I’ve tried every exercise imaginable, and there are a few I have genuinely no interest in doing and don’t derive any satisfaction or pleasure from them, like leg press machines, those adductor and abductor thigh machines, hip thrusts, and even crunches. I would rather do just about anything else than any of these.

Extrinsic motivation is an athlete who needs to drop some body weight for a weight-class sport. A good example is MMA fighter Paddy Pimblett, who comfortably walks around at 190 lbs. and has gotten well above that, but he often fights in the 150’s. If he wants to fight—and therefore get paid and keep fighting—he needs to drop weight, often in excess of 50 lbs., which is no small feat. His is an external motivation. As successful as he has been at it, the wild swings in weight have had negative effects on him cognitively, such as, by his own admission, developing some disordered eating.

The ideas here are to find or at least be aware of what motivates you to improve your health and follow through with actions and decisions (like when and how to exercise and what to eat) that will work towards that improvement. Extrinsic motivation can be potent, but it doesn’t usually last as long as intrinsic motivation, so a good approach might be to identify both intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, and when one begins to falter, you can lean more on the other. Better yet, maybe have a couple of each.

Another review examines motivation through the transtheoretical model (TTM) of behavior change, which is “a five-stage theory to explain changes in people’s health behavior. It suggests that change takes time, that different interventions are effective at different stages, and that there are multiple outcomes (e.g., in belief structure, self-efficacy) occurring across the stages.”5

The first stage of the TTM is the pre-contemplative stage. “Individuals in the precontemplation stage have no apparent interest in engaging in health behavior. Individuals in this stage do not consider the need of change and are resistant to suggestions of change.”6 The authors note that this stage is also consistent with feelings of amotivation.

In exploring the roots of this amotivation, the authors explain that “Amotivation may stem from low levels of self-efficacy, outcome expectancies, effort beliefs, and value beliefs.”

“Low self-efficacy relates to low confidence and feelings that the individual lacks the capacity or resources to produce the desired behavior.
“Low outcome expectancies relate to beliefs that the costs of the behavior outweigh the benefits.
“A lack of effort beliefs is concerned with the recognition of the required amount of effort or energy needed to change behavior (e.g., perceiving physical activity as “too hard”), or overcome the perceived barriers and disinhibiting factors (e.g., fear of embarrassment, lack of knowledge)…
“Low value beliefs relate to not attaching sufficient value to the behavior to make it worthwhile pursuing.”

So, if someone appears to be unmotivated or amotivated towards their health, it may actually be a downstream effect of an upstream issue: low or lack of confidence that they have the ability—effort and behavior—to work towards health improvement.

Also, there might be an issue with the perception of exercise. When I was young and gung-ho about health and fitness, I got to the point where every workout had to be a level 10 effort, and if it wasn’t, then I was slacking it. Then, I started to dread working out. I would literally get anxiety about having to do it. This is to say that a person’s amotivation might be linked to their perception that exercise needs to be overly intense. It doesn’t.

Another study on this topic explores the relationship between our subjective feelings towards exercise and the intensity it’s performed at. (“Intensity” is another way to say, “level of effort exerted”. Low-intensity is low effort, and high-intensity is high-effort; it’s the difference in effort between walking and sprinting or doing ten back squats for half of the total weight you can move versus doing the maximal weight you can move for five reps.) The authors explain that “Low-to-moderate exercise intensity is suggested to elicit positive affect, whereas severe intensity is thought to result in negative affect across individuals.”7 That is, if you tend to have low- to moderate-intensity training or exercise sessions, you’ll likely have more motivation to do them leading to better consistency and adherence. On the other hand, if you tend to have higher-intensity sessions—again, higher effort—you’ll likely be less motivated to do them, which can lead you to skip sessions and being less consistent.

The underpinnings of motivation are complicated and have their roots in cognitive, physiological, behavioral, social, and environmental factors and influences, and we’re scratching the surface of scratching the surface here, but if you find your motivation is dissipating, waning, or has completely dissolved, consider some of the following factors that may be inhibiting its growth and some strategies to promote it, like:

Time constraints and demands and work and family obligations.
Try to identify some motivating factors, both intrinsic and extrinsic, that is, internal and external.
Remember the transtheoretical model of behavior, which emphasizes that change takes time—including the ebbing and flowing of motivation—and is composed of five stages. Try to identify where you are on this spectrum and adjust accordingly:

“Precontemplation (not thinking about changing behavior), (b) contemplation (considering changing behavior), (c) preparation (occasionally changing behavior), (d) action (practicing the healthful behavior on a regular basis, resulting in major benefits), and (e) maintenance (continuing the behavior after 6 months of regular practice).”8

When choosing how, when, and where to exercise, choose something that you enjoy, something that you derive pleasure from, something that you look forward to doing.
Intensity (effort) does not need to be high. In exercise science, exercise, workout, and training programs are often designed around periods of varying intensities. Scale your intensity to your level of motivation: high motivation = higher intensity; lower motivation = lower intensity. It’s also a good approach to scale back high intensity work before you really start feeling it psychologically and definitely before you feel it physically.

One last thing on motivation and progress: it’s self-reinforcing. There are countless anecdotes of people working out when they didn’t feel like it, and they end up having great sessions. Hitting an extra rep or two on an exercise, doing more weight than last time, or even feeling like the same exact thing is easier now than it had been a short time ago, these are all motivating factors.

Just remember that motivation comes and goes; it ebbs and flows. More important than motivation is the belief and confidence you have in yourself that you can do the things you want to do, make the changes you want to make, and work towards the goals you want to achieve.

It might take some time, but you can get there.

The Flexitorium by Joseph Anthony

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