How to Stay Consistent With Fitness When Motivation Fades

Nikkiey: Motivation is a feeling that makes starting any journey feel so easy. It's that "Oh my gosh, I'm so excited to start this new workout program" or "I'm so excited to get into WarriorBabe." That's motivation, but it is a terrible foundation for staying consistent. The reframe I want you to carry with you is this: motivation is the spark, but it is not the fuel. It will get you started, but it is not what keeps you going. What keeps you going is what we're going to dive into: the system, the structure that removes the need to feel motivated in order to act.

What's going on, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of The WarriorBabe Show with your host, Nikkiey Stott. On these episodes, we talk about mindset, methodologies and tactics that will help you lose body fat, build muscle, be strong and feel insanely confident.

Today is episode number 351. Today we're going to talk about something I talked about a really long time ago, and I've probably brought it up a couple of times here and there across all 350 episodes. But I want to bring it back and remind you that no matter how long you've been on your fitness journey, no matter how many times you've started over, no matter how much you know about nutrition and training and all of the things, and even if you're just learning or just starting out, motivation runs out. Every single time, motivation runs out.

So today we're going to get into the actual mechanics. What does a system look like in real life? Why do most people's systems quietly break down without them realizing it? And what do you do on the days when your system and your motivation feel impossible? I've touched on focusing on your systems instead of the end goals, because that's what helps you stay the course even when motivation isn't there. I'm taking that topic and repurposing it in a different light. Something new is being born from that topic, if that makes sense.

I want to start here because I think there's a lot of confusion about what motivation actually is and the role it's supposed to play in your fitness journey. I remember having this conversation with Sal DiStefano, the main guy from Mind Pump. He was on The WarriorBabe Show way back, I think in the hundreds or maybe before that. I asked him right out of the gate, "What's one of the misconceptions you see in the fitness space?" He talked about motivation, and it was a really cool concept that he dove into. So I want to bring that back and remind you that motivation is an emotion.

Like every single emotion, it is temporary. It is unpredictable. And it is completely outside of your control. Motivation disappears when life gets hard, when you're tired, and when results aren't coming fast enough. If something stressful happens at work, it disappears. And if you have a bad day, a bad week, maybe an even worse weekend, the whole journey you're on just feels pointless. Fitness, nutrition, workouts: it all feels pointless. Why even continue?

Motivation is a feeling that makes starting any journey feel so easy. It's that "Oh my gosh, I'm so excited to start this new workout program" or "I'm so excited to get into WarriorBabe." That's motivation, but it is a terrible foundation for staying consistent. So the reframe I want you to carry with you is that motivation is the spark, but it is not the fuel.

It will get you started, but it is not what keeps you going. What keeps you going is what we're going to dive into: the system, the structure that removes the need to feel motivated in order to act.

Think about brushing your teeth every morning and every night. I hope you brush them two times a day. You don't wake up every morning feeling motivated to brush your teeth, right? You don't think, "Oh, I'm so excited to brush my teeth." You don't hype yourself up over it.

You don't need to be in the right headspace. You just do it, because it's a habit so deeply embedded in your routine that the question of whether you'd rather do it doesn't even come up. It's automatic. That's what a great fitness system looks like. It's not rigid. It's not perfect. It's not a military-style schedule. It's a structure so ingrained in your life that showing up is the default, and not showing up is the thing that feels weird and awkward.

That's the ideal place to get to. The goal is never to stay motivated. I'll be the first one to tell you, after 10 years on my journey, and if you talk to any WarriorBabes, or to Maggie, or to Andrew, or to any one of us: we are not motivated every single day. The goal is never to stay motivated. The goal is to build something that works even when you're not working, even when you're not motivated.

So if systems are the answer, why do so many people build them and then still fall off? I've watched this happen with thousands of women, and it almost always comes down to one of four reasons.

The first reason is that the system was built for their best self, not their real self. This is the most common one. You sit down on a Sunday feeling so inspired, and you build out the perfect week. You meal prepped on Sunday. You have your entire gym schedule: you're going to the gym Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

Your macros are already tracked in your app for every single day. You're in bed by 10 p.m. It looks incredible on paper. And then your real life comes knocking. Knock, knock, knock. You get a last-minute work deadline. Your kid gets sick. You're exhausted from a stressful week at work. The idea of cooking four containers of food on one of your free afternoons sounds like absolute torture, and it's the last thing you want to do. All you want to do is lie horizontal on the couch.

Your system required your best-case scenario. Think about where you planned it from. You were so hyped. It requires your best case to execute, so the whole thing collapses the moment conditions aren't perfect. A good system is not built for your best days. It is built to survive your worst ones. So just remember that, and take into consideration your real-life situations and the things that might happen.

For me, I live and die by my calendar. I'm able to see, "Oh, that day is packed. I'm going to be realistic. I'm not cooking dinner. I'm not going to the gym." It's about being honest and real with yourself and taking into account your real self, not your best self.

The second thing I see is that the system had no flexibility built into it. It's all-or-nothing thinking, and all-or-nothing thinking kills more fitness journeys than anything else.

When your system is "I track every day perfectly or I failed and I sucked today," one bad day becomes permission to abandon the entire week. When your system is "I work out five days a week or I'm off track," missing one session becomes a reason to miss three more that week. A system needs room to bend, mold and rearrange without you feeling like you're breaking it.

That flexibility you build into it is not you being weak or lazy. It's what makes a system sustainable and realistic over months and years instead of just weeks.

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The third one I see is that friction was way too high. Friction is anything that makes the desired behavior harder to do. Your gym bag isn't packed, so you have to find your shoes, your headphones and your water bottle before you leave. That's friction. Your food isn't prepped, so you have to make a decision about every single meal from scratch. Friction. Your workout isn't planned, so you spend 10 or 15 minutes in the gym trying to figure out what you're doing. Friction.

All of that friction adds up. On a low-motivation day, any one of those things is enough to tip the scale toward skipping it. What a great system does is reduce friction to the absolute minimum, so the path of least resistance leads toward the behavior you want, not away from it.

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The last one I see is that the system relied on decisions. Every decision you make requires energy and mental bandwidth. Decision fatigue is real. Real, real. Ladies, when your husband or partner asks you, "What do you want for dinner?" you say, "I don't know." You don't want to have to make that decision on a night you're not cooking, right? That decision fatigue is real. You probably make tons of decisions every day for your family and your kids. The last thing you want to think about is eating.

By the end of a long, stressful day, your decision-making capacity is genuinely fatigued and depleted. If your system requires you to decide what to eat, when to work out and how hard to push, all in the moment, you're going to make the wrong call more often than not, because you're tired and depleted. What I've seen is that making decisions in advance is a great system. You decide once, when you have the energy and the clarity. That looks like planning your weeks in advance and prepping your meals a day before.

Then you don't have to decide, "What am I going to eat for lunch today?" You don't have to decide again in the moment, when you don't want to decide.

So let's talk practical. What might a real, sustainable, life-proof fitness system actually look like in real time?

When it comes to your workouts, anchor them to an existing habit. That's one of the most powerful things you can do, especially when you're starting out.

Let's say you joined a program, you're so excited and motivated, and you're acting on willpower and hype. The most powerful thing you can do is make training automatic by attaching it to something you already do every day without thinking. Not "I'll work out when I have the time," because you're never going to have the time. You have to make the time. The number one thing I hear people say is "I'm too busy to work out." I'm sure you're busy. Everybody is busy. People who are busy make the time to work out.

This is what anchoring your workouts looks like: right after I drop the kids off at school, or before I open my laptop in the morning, or immediately after work before I get home, that's when I'm going to work out. The existing habit becomes the trigger, and the workout becomes the automatic next thing. "Right after I drop the kids off at school, I'm going to work out." Or "Before I open my laptop in the morning, I'm going to work out." You stop having to decide when to work out, because it's already decided.

Then it lives in a slot that's already in your day. For me, I have it on my calendar. I have a time block you can see, scheduled 365 days out, maybe even more. It's an event on my calendar that I will not remove, and I recommend you do the same thing.

The next thing I'd say is design your environment before you need the willpower to act. That means pack your bag the night before and put it in front of your door.

Lay out your gym clothes beside your bed or on a chair if you have one, or fold them in your closet so they're the first thing you see. Keep your food scale on the counter, not in the cabinet. I do this at home. Have your go-to high-protein meals planned for the week, so you're not staring into the fridge at 6 p.m. on an empty stomach, trying to figure out what to make.

Here's a genius thing I did for myself this week. I cook three nights a week, so I asked AI to give me three dinners where I could use the ingredients from one meal interchangeably across all three, so I'm not wasting food, but the proteins change. It was the most genius thing. On Monday I made chicken thighs and vegetables with a carb, and I made a ton of the vegetables.

I saved the vegetables and some of the leftover chicken thighs. The next day, I used the vegetables and made a pasta with the shredded chicken thighs. There wasn't enough protein, so I cooked up some ground turkey and added that in. So it was penne pasta with vegetables, chicken thigh and ground turkey. I still have vegetables left over, so I'm going to do a stir-fry with sirloin steak, the vegetables and rice.

All of the food gets used. And you see, I'm already setting up the environment beforehand. All my meals are decided well in advance, and then I make them throughout the week. Your environment should be set up to make the right decisions and the right choices easy for you, because when you're tired and not motivated, you're going to take the path of least resistance.

So even when you're not motivated and you want to take it easy, the thinking is already done. All you have to do is plug and play. And trust me, I was not motivated that one day. My Tuesday was packed, and the last thing I wanted to do was make dinner. But since it was already planned and I had food left over from the night before, I just had to mix it all together. It took me 20 minutes. So even when you're not motivated, make sure the path of least resistance still leads you where you want to go.

The next one is to build a minimum viable version of every habit: the minimum you'll still do. This is the one that could change everything for you on the days when life is genuinely hard. For every element of your system, have a minimum version that still counts as you showing up. If you can't do your full hour workout, what's your minimum? 30 minutes?

30 minutes? [...] is a bonus at that point. That could be the absolute game changer. If there's one thing I'd tell you to implement, it's this. What is the minimum viable version of each habit you're building into your system? Look at every element of your system, make sure each one has a minimum version, and still show up.

Then plan for exceptions, because they are going to happen. The people who stay consistent long term are not the ones who never have hard days or hard weeks. They're the ones who already know what they're going to do when a hard week or a hard day hits, before it even hits. So what's your plan? If you're traveling or you have a family event, do you think ahead? When I was coaching, my women would come to me in the first month and say, "I have X, Y and Z planned this month with my family," or "I'm traveling for work." So we'd get ahead of it, make a plan and plan for those exceptions before they happened.

If you don't have a plan for those scenarios in advance, you're going to make an emotional decision in the moment, and emotional decisions under stress almost never align with your goals. So plan for the exceptions now, ahead of time, when you can think clearly, so future you already has it on autopilot with a script to follow.

I'm going to say this with love. This whole talk has been about systems: how we implement them day to day and where I've seen people fall short. Systems are incredibly powerful. But a system needs you behind it. It needs identity, you working toward something and changing who you are now to become somebody who is actually a fitness person, someone for whom working out is just ingrained in her habits.

Systems without that kind of identity are just schedules, and schedules get abandoned. If you don't love and care about the outcome you're working toward, the system will get abandoned along the way. To break that down even more: the reason the most consistent women in the WarriorBabe community stay consistent isn't just that they have a good system. It's that they've made a fundamental shift in who they believe they are becoming. They're not trying to become someone who works out.

They are someone who works out. They're not trying to become someone who tracks their macros. They are someone who tracks their macros. That identity piece, "this is just who I am now," is what makes the system feel natural instead of forced. And here's the thing about identity: it's built through evidence. Every time you show up when you don't feel like it, you cast a vote for who you are right now.

Every time you choose the minimum version over nothing, you cast a vote for the future you that you're working toward becoming. Every time you honor the plan you made for yourself instead of making an emotional decision in the moment, that's a vote. You're voting for the person you're working toward becoming. Those votes add up, and at some point, maybe without you even noticing exactly when, the identity becomes real. You stop having to motivate yourself to show up, because showing up is just what you do now.

It's who you are. That's the long game, and it is so worth playing. I'm saying that because I'm on the other side of it.

So here's a summary of everything we covered today, because I want this to be something you can actually use and put into place, not just something that sounds good while I'm speaking to you through this episode. Motivation is the spark. It's what gets you started. It is not what keeps you going. Build a great system.

That means one built for your real life, not your best self. One that has flexibility. One that reduces friction. One that eliminates decisions by making them in advance. And one that has a minimum version for every hard day. That is a great system. Then identity is what makes the system stick. Every time you show up anyway, like when you don't have time for an hour workout but you show up for a 30-minute workout, that's you showing up.

Every time, you're building the evidence for who you are and who you're becoming. Maybe the you right now is someone who tracks inconsistently and works out inconsistently, getting 2,000 steps a day, then 5,000, and then going through periods of doing none of it. Something needs to change. Start by thinking about the person you're becoming, the one who is consistent.

Not perfect. Consistent in the way she shows up. Consistent in getting her workouts in. Consistent in tracking her macros. Consistent in having a plan. Consistent in making decisions in advance, so she can be on autopilot during the week. In between is you taking different actions to make these systems work in your life, and then showing up every day, in some capacity, in a way that supports that future you. On the hard days, don't negotiate. Just start. Just do it. Just use the minimum. Separate feelings from actions.

And just take the action, because regardless of how you're feeling, the action is going to feel great in the end, since it's a minimum standard you set for yourself. When you don't feel ready, you don't need to feel motivated. You just need to start, and the systems you have in place will take it from there. All right?

Before I end this episode, if you want to be surrounded by women who are building exactly this kind of consistency, who show up imperfectly, do the work even on the hard days and support each other, come join us in the free WarriorBabe community.

It's completely free, and it's full of women in your exact stage of life, maybe even living in the same town as you. You can find an accountability partner in real time, or over the internet. So many women in our community have done that. Environment matters. Who you're around matters. So tap the link in the show notes below to join. It's actually there. I feel like on the last couple of episodes I said that and it wasn't there. It's there.

Then share this episode with someone in your life who has been struggling to stay consistent and just needs this. I promise she'll hear this and maybe show up differently. You could be the pillar. You could be the reason she shows up differently. All right? I'll see you in the next episode. I love you very much. Have a great rest of your day.

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