End Your Workout With Your Favorite Exercise
In my college classes and certification courses, I was taught many times about the importance of exercise order (big muscle groups before smaller ones, the exercises most applicable to the person’s goals first).
The focus was always on how the workout starts, but there was very little consideration given to how the workout ends.
I think the way you end your workout might be even more important than the way you start it.
The end of your workout has a big influence on your memory of it, and therefore your motivation to work out again.
And since the physical and mental benefits of exercise come not from one single workout, but from many, many workouts strung together over time, it’s your motivation that really makes or breaks your results.
The Two Selves
Please stay with me here while I delve into some light behavioral psychology.
You can basically be divided into two versions of yourself. There’s your experiencing self and your remembering self.
Your experiencing self is the one that’s in the moment, feeling what’s going on at the present time. Your remembering self is the one that recalls the experience afterwards.
As Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman, who came up with this concept, explained: “when we are asked ‘how good was the vacation’, it is not an experiencing self that answers, but a remembering and evaluating self…”
Because of the way your brain filters your experiences and stores your memories, those two selves are not the same. You can experience something as great but remember it as not-so-great, and vice-versa.
For exercise motivation, the remembering self is more important.
The Importance Of Remembering A Workout Positively
There’s a pivotal moment that determines whether you’re going to achieve your health and fitness goals, and that moment doesn’t happen in the gym.
It happens when you decide whether or not to do your next workout.
It’s when you’re looking at your sneakers and deciding whether to put them on and head out the door, or bail and sit down on the couch.
In that moment, you’re subconsciously weighing all the different factors.
You’re taking into account how important your goals are to you, how well they align with your self-identity and values, how pleasant or unpleasant your last workout was, and how pleasant or unpleasant you expect it to be this time.
The Experience Of A Workout
I’m not going to sugarcoat it. Exercise can feel unpleasant. If you’re challenging your muscles enough to stimulate growth, it doesn’t feel good in the moment. Your muscles burn, you feel tired, you often want to stop.
I believe the benefits of exercise are so overwhelmingly positive that it makes all that discomfort worth it.
But even if you really hate every second of it, even if you feel like you’d rather step on a Lego than do another set, you can still convince your remembering self that it wasn’t that bad.
The Peak-End Rule
The “peak-end rule”, another Daniel Kahneman concept, states that human beings remember an experience based on the peak of the experience and the end.
If you sit through a boring lecture but something unexpected happens in the middle and the end is really interesting, you’re likely to remember that lecture as being interesting, even though you were bored out of your mind for most of it.
Aren’t our brains fascinating?!
What Does This Mean For Your Workouts?
We’re motivated to do things that we enjoy, that feel good for us. Building long-lasting workout motivation means finding enjoyment in the exercise itself.
But you don’t have to like every moment of it. All you really need to do to stay motivated is to remember it as pleasant and enjoyable.
As we know from the peak-end rule, remembering the workout positively is as simple as making sure you have an enjoyable peak sometime during your workout, and an enjoyable end to your workout.
A couple of days later, when your brain is deciding whether you should head to the gym or make an excuse, it will remember your last workout as relatively pleasant and infer that this next one will be similar.
End Your Workout With Your Favorite Exercise
Whatever your favorite or most enjoyable exercise is, end your workout with it. Maybe that’s squats because they make you feel strong. Maybe that’s bicep curls because you like the way your arms look in the mirror.
I often end my workouts with a “finisher” exercise that works multiple muscle groups and gets my heart rate up.
One of my favorites is ball slams, where you squat down to pick up a medicine ball, stand up and raise the ball over your head in one powerful motion, then slam it back down to the floor as hard as you can.
It’s a great stress and frustration reliever, it doesn’t take a lot of technique or skill, and, honestly, it just feels good to slam something into the floor.
If my workout has been a real grind, I’ll often throw this exercise in at the end to give me something positive to end on.
The Bottom Line
Motivation is key to getting all the incredible benefits of exercise, and enjoyment is key to motivation.
Your brain remembers an experience based on the peak and end of that experience. By ending your workout with your favorite exercise, you’re more likely to remember that workout as enjoyable and be motivated to do it again.
Give this a try and let me know how it feels!
