Five Things I Learned About Habits from Exercising for a Year Straight

What does it take to maintain a daily workout habit for a year? Many people want to make exercise a priority, and according to one study, “doing more exercise or improving my fitness” was the top New Year’s resolution for Americans for 2021.

I’ve always been fairly consistent with exercising in the morning before my kids wake up, but I had never committed to following a daily regimen. At the end of September 2020, I connected with a group of women who also followed the same exercise program by YouTube fitness trainer Sydney Cummings. Sydney posts daily workouts on her channel, and we agreed to check in with each other every morning when the workouts went live at 5 AM to encourage each other to get out of bed and start moving. The accountability was a critical piece of me staying consistent, because I knew these other women were doing the workouts alongside me.

Sydney provides encouragement at the end of each workout, and I started documenting them in January 2021 in a spreadsheet. Her “daily wisdom” helped me stick with the habit of working out consistently for a year- even bringing various sets of dumbbells with me on trips to Pennsylvania to visit my family. Here are five quotes from Sydney which reflect the things I learned about habits along this amazing journey.

1. Connecting to your “why” allows you to keep moving forward with your habit long after the motivation is gone.

Everything that you commit to, when you’re in the mood to commit to that goal, has to stay happening when you’re no longer in the mood. That’s a prime example of motivation not being everything. It’s dedication, it’s commitment, it’s why you’re doing it. That keeps you coming back on the days where it feels lousy to show up.

Sydney Cummings

Many people think they need more motivation or willpower to make the changes that they want in their life. The problem, as BJ Fogg explains in his book Tiny Habits, is that “both motivation and willpower are shape-shifters by nature, which makes them unreliable.”

While motivation is required because it’s the desire that prompts a behavior, where your motivation comes from is important. If you have a strong “why” to connect you to your habit at a deeper level, then your motivation comes from intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, sources.

For example, exercising for aesthetic reasons is fine, but for me it’s much more effective to connect to my deepest why: modeling healthy behaviors for my kids and prioritizing health as part of my legacy. This is consistent with James’ Clear concept of identity-based habits. As he explains, “Many people begin the process of changing their habits by focusing on what they want to achieve. This leads us to outcome-based habits. The alternative is to build identity-based habits. With this approach, we start by focusing on who we wish to become.” Jen Sincero echoes this in her book Badass Habits, “Good habits are about who you decide to be, not what you decide to do.”

By telling myself that I am a person who exercises daily, I become that person over time. If I were to choose one day not to exercise it would feel like a part of me was missing, because I have tied it to my identity.

2. We are more likely to change our habits when they make us feel good.

In the pursuit of your goals, you need to feel good.

Sydney Cummings

The majority of the workouts I’ve done of the past year have been a combination of strength training and cardio interval training. With strength training, I’ve pushed increasingly heavier weights and experienced muscle fatigue. With cardio workouts, it often feels like my heart is beating out of my chest. Most would not describe exercise as “pleasant,” however, the feeling when you are done with a workout is one of accomplishment and pride.

In Tiny Habits, BJ Fogg offers a short but powerful reminder about habits: “I change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad.” The habits that are most successful are the ones that give us that dopamine hit that propels us to do the habit again. The problem is that many of us are so focused on the end goal that we push ourselves too hard too fast and are miserable. This is one of the reasons most people drop their New Year’s resolutions by February.

The best way to feel good in the development of a new habit is to make the habit incredibly small. In the words of Leo Babauta, “Make it so easy you can’t say no.” Or in Tiny Habits language, “Making a behavior radically tiny is the cornerstone of the Tiny Habits method for a reason—it’s a foolproof way to make something easier to do, which means it’s often a good place to start regardless of your motivation levels.”

When you make your habits “radically tiny” it is easier to reach your goals, which makes you feel good and motivates you to do more. In my case, I promised myself that I’d show up for the workout no matter what, and at least get started. If I felt like I couldn’t continue, I gave myself the permission to stop. But I always pushed through to the end once I got started, and was rewarded with Sydney telling me, “You have made it to your cool down!”

3. Small, consistent actions lead to big results over time.

Small decisions one minute at a time add up to big changes in your journey.

Sydney Cummings

One of the frustrations people have with habits is how long it takes for them to “stick.” The 21-day myth is still perpetuated by the personal development industry, despite evidence to the contrary that the average is more like 66 days and depends on the complexity of the habit. So many people get discouraged and quit before their brains have the time to wire in the new habit.

One way to increase your chance of success, besides taking small consistent steps in the direction of your goals, is to design a prompt that guarantees success. Every behavior starts with a prompt (otherwise known as a cue in habits research) within a certain context. As BJ Fogg explains, “Taking the first step, no matter how small, can generate a sense of momentum that our brains love. Completing tasks gives us a boost of confidence, and this increases our motivation to do the entire behavior.” The prompt is what helps us to complete the whole behavior.

My prompt is putting out my workout clothes, AirPods, and water bottle out the night before. When the alarm goes off in the morning, I grab everything and go immediately into the basement to get ready. By dialing in my prompt, I am able to show up every morning and push myself in my workouts each day.

4. Muscle failure is welcome during a strength workout, it is a sign that you are challenging yourself with maximum effort so that you can gain strength over time. Similarly, a perceived “failure” with habits gives us the opportunity to learn and get stronger.

Failure is not forever. Failure is forward.

Sydney Cummings

I have perfectionistic tendencies and shy away from activities where I think I may fail. One thing that a year of consistent workouts has taught me (mostly strength workouts) is that failure is a sign that you’ve challenged yourself. For example, one type of workout is called a “drop set”. You start with a challenging weight, do a few repetitions until you can’t do any more, and then you pick a lighter weight and do as many repetitions as you can, and so on until the time period is done. You don’t beat yourself up for “failing” because it’s part of the process.

When it comes to habits, BJ Fogg reminds us that if you are setting yourself up for success with a well-designed prompt and small first steps, “emotional risk is eliminated. There is no real failure in Tiny Habits. There are little stumbles, but if you get up again, that’s not failure—that’s a habit in the making.”

If you forget to do your habit one day, or life gets in the way, don’t beat yourself up. Remember this simple mantra from James Clear: “Never miss twice…Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.” Reassess your environment, your prompt, and the size of your habit. Does it need to be made smaller so you can do it consistently? Do you need to change something in your environment to set yourself up for success? Small tweaks can get you back on track in no time.

5. Celebrating the journey to healthier habits, not just the destination, is critical to sticking with them in the long-term.

It’s about making you the best version of you. Not just getting you to one goal and THEN you’ll be happy. Be happy now. Be proud now.

Sydney Cummings

The arrival fallacy, coined by Harvard-trained positive psychology expert Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar, is the “illusion that once we make it, once we attain our goal or reach our destination, we will reach lasting happiness.” While there is a feeling of pride and accomplishment after reaching a goal, it is often short-lived. So rather than focusing on happiness as a result of a certain outcome, it is more rewarding to celebrate the small wins you experience along the way.

One reason I love the Tiny Habits approach is that celebration is a key component of the program. By immediately celebrating successes, no matter how small, “you create a positive feeling inside yourself on demand. This good feeling wires the new habit into your brain.” The immediacy of the celebration is key, and using a variety of techniques (saying “good job” out loud, doing a happy dance, telling your partner, etc.) can act like “habit fertilizer” according to Fogg.

Every morning right after I complete my workout, I send a message to my accountability group telling them I am done and what moves I found the most challenging. We cheer each other on daily and celebrate our successes (like lifting a heavier weight or doing more repetitions than the day before). This celebration definitely wired the habit into my brain. I was proud of myself along the journey, not just when I reached the one year mark.

Nothing is Wasted – Start Your New Habit Today

Habits require commitment and dedication, especially on the days when motivation and willpower are lacking. Many times we get discouraged because nothing seems to be “happening.” When we don’t see the progress that we want in the time period we want, it is easy to give up.

Anchoring to our deepest “why” and identity, setting up our environment for success, creating a prompt that motivates us, keeping every action small, and celebrating every success are some of the ways that we can set ourselves up to stick with our new habit. But it’s also important to recognize that none of our effort is wasted, even if habits may take longer than we would like.

I love this analogy from James Clear in his book Atomic Habits:

Imagine that you have an ice cube sitting on the table in front of you. The room is cold and you can see your breath. It is currently twenty-five degrees. Ever so slowly, the room begins to heat up. Twenty-six degrees. Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight. The ice cube is still sitting on the table in front of you. Twenty-nine degrees. Thirty. Thirty-one. Still, nothing has happened. Then, thirty-two degrees. The ice begins to melt. A one-degree shift, seemingly no different from the temperature increases before it, has unlocked a huge change. Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions, which build up the potential required to unleash a major change.

James Clear, Atomic Habits

Over the past year I got stronger, both physically and mentally. I became more flexible, more willing to take risks and embrace “failure.” These did not happen overnight, however. Every day and every repetition was one more step toward my goal, and none of them were wasted. Case in point: I just purchased a 50 pound dumbbell after starting with a pair of 15 pound weights. I am proud of my journey, and excited for the journey to come.