The principles that helped me start and sustain the exercise habit - Part 1

The summer of 2024 has been a fruitful season for my activity tracking. I closed three rings - move, exercise and stand - on the Apple Watch fitness tracker each day in June, July, and August 2024. Two other results by virtue of closing three rings each day - I hit a longest move streak of 107 days and counting as well as I reached 1 million steps and still counting. 

This post is a reflection of principles that helped me get the above results. Some of the principles I applied deliberately and some are reflection in hindsight. The two books - Atomic Habits by James Clear and Tiny Habits by B J Fogg - have been instrumental in achieving the results as well as inspiration in establishing the principles outlined below.    

Identity and behaviour

Thus far in life, I have been fortunate to have good physical health. I say fortunate as there was no deliberate action on my part until a few years ago to have good physical health. So continuing that as identity - I am a fit person - was relatively simpler. Only this time, I wanted to be deliberate in my behaviour. The deliberate behaviour that I targeted was - I will exercise consistently. This behaviour and identity as principle allows for sustaining a habit. 

Identity = I am a fit person

Behaviour = I exercise

Taking the above equation further, it can be generalized as below and applied to any identity and behaviour. 

Identity A = I am X

Behaviour A = I will do X that reinforces my Identity A

Establish behaviour - By starting small

The identity and behaviour principle is critical to sustain the habit. However, before I could sustain a habit, I had to start the habit. Triple One’s Method (TOM) helped me establish the behaviour to exercise consistently. There was no specific outcome in the short term other than ensuring I performed the behaviour daily. Breaking it down through the lens of TOM, I wanted to exercise that specific day for just 1 minute.

Triple One’s Method (TOM) = 1 habit, 1 minute, 1 day / week / month

Long term outcomes

The identity I am a fit person is an identity for life. It’s necessary to sustain a habit. It is also essential to add a tinge of motivation. Setting a long term outcome helps in just that - motivation on a long term horizon. For this identity, my long term outcome is  “I will be able to walk and hike in nature when I’m 85 the way I’m doing now”. I have no idea if I will live till 85 and I have no idea  if I will be fit to hike the way I do today - that outcome is outside my control. However, I can influence this outcome and that is through performing the behaviour of exercise.

Long term outcome = Aspirational outcome on a long term horizon that drives you. Achieving it on a daily basis or even on the long term basis is outside of your control. However, it’s possible to influence this outcome on a daily / consistent basis

There are a few more principles that were vital to reach 3 perfect months of activity, 107 days and counting of move streak and 1 million and counting of steps. In next week’s post, I will elaborate what the below principles mean to me and how it helped. 

Principles that will be covered in next week’s post -

• Set routine

• Multiple flavours of the same behaviour

• External motivators

• External factors