Buy Walking VideosPay Yourself To Exercise
One of the best motivators is bribery. One good way to get into the habit of exercising every day is to pay yourself to exercise. Whether you’re walking, going to the gym, riding your exercise bike or pounding the pavement, you can motivate yourself to get your exercise done by bribing yourself.
According to the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, it would take anywhere from $9 to $37 a week to convince people to walk for their own health.
He pointed out that one hour of activity per week does not meet government health standards of 30 minutes, five days a week for moderate intensity activity such as walking. In the study, sedentary and inactive adults wanted $36.30 per week to do this much exercise. If they had to go in a group, they wanted nearly twice as much more.
Money is a great incentive. Giving yourself some money every day as a reward for getting your exercise done has worked for me in the past. You can read about it here:
I even created a form to keep track of my weekly bribes:
- Weekly Goals Journal Sheet from Starling Fitness: Excel spreadsheet for use with MS Office or Open Office.
If you’re having a hard time getting into the habit of exercising every day, try bribery.
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March 2nd, 2009 at 11:08 am
I don’t know Laura…. Seems like this would work better for me if it were someone else’s money being paid to me. If I want money (it being my own) I just take it, nothing keeping me from giving money to myself. Maybe if I were a miser by nature (which I’m not).
March 2nd, 2009 at 1:08 pm
What a unique take! My personal incentive to myself for exercising is I kinda sorta enjoy the latent burn in my muscles after working out.
Truth to tell, however, I’d love it if someone would pay me too….. 🙂
Barbara
March 2nd, 2009 at 11:40 pm
What happens if you hardly have any disposable income? I’m in my first year of my career struggling to pay off my university debts. What could I use to bribe myself that wouldn’t entail money or things that cost [too much] money?
At one point, my mom & I actually tried a similar idea to yours. We worth down about 8 daily goals each. Every goal was worth $0.25, therefore a max total of $2 per day. Whoever “earned” the most money by the end was paid by the person who earned the least money that month. It you were successful every day, this could add up to $60! It seemed like a competitive fun motivating idea at the time, but with our busy lives we seemed to have had trouble simply keeping track of our accomplished goals, and hence dropped the idea unfortunately.
On a different note, I’m going to share a couple more webcomics that a good friend suggested to me. I haven’t read too many strips yet so I’m not sure how good they are, but in case you’re interested, here they are: http://www.qwantz.com http://www.xkcd.com