Simple 'Lazy Girl Fitness' hack can help you have a gym routine that sticks
It's backed by science.
A woman working out at the gym wearing headphones.
In 2018, author James Clear released “Atomic Habits,” a book about making significant changes through building small habits. The book's takeaway is that you don’t have to commit to drastic, overnight changes to improve yourself. You can do so by slowly working your way towards a goal.
"All big things come from small beginnings,” Clear writes in the book. “The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision. But as that decision is repeated, a habit sprouts and grows stronger. Roots entrench themselves and branches grow. The task of breaking a bad habit is like uprooting a powerful oak within us. And the task of building a good habit is like cultivating a delicate flower one day at a time."
TikTokker Ashie Adams has a similar theory she calls the Lazy Girl Fitness hack. She says people can create a regular fitness routine by breaking a trip to the gym down into 2 distinct events instead of one that feels overwhelming.
“It’s my secret formula for making becoming a gym girlie happen,” she explains. "When you start working out, actually getting to the gym is 90% of the battle. You have to treat the action of getting to the gym and the action of working out as 2 completely separate habits.”
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Ashie then breaks down the two distinct tasks: “Getting to the gym is a matter of waking up early, finding the time to do it, finding your workout clothes [and] getting out of the door on time,” she says in a video with over 500,00 views. “Working out is a matter of having the motivation and having the right workout program. But one cannot exist without the other, so the first habit to develop is just getting to the gym.”
The Utah mother says that for the first 30 days, people should focus on getting to the gym and little else. If you leave the car and enter the gym try walking on the treadmill for 15 to 20 minutes. Then, slowly, once you’ve mastered getting to the gym, you can start developing a workout routine.
Ashie says that this 2-step technique allowed her to build a positive gym habit without getting overwhelmed and quitting after a few days.
“Nine times out of 10, when I tried and failed to create the habit of going to the gym, it was because I was completely overwhelming myself,” she says in the video. “I wasn’t trying to do one new thing, which is work out. I was doing 40 things, [which] is genuinely too much for one person to undertake all in one go.”
The 2-step Lazy Girl Fitness hack doesn’t just sound easy and effective, it’s based on solid scientific principles. According to neurology researchers, micro-habits are one of the easiest ways to develop new routines. Micro-habits are small, regular behavioral changes that are easy to build into a routine because they don’t encourage psychological resistance and won’t disappear as willpower erodes.
Eventually, these new behaviors, such as driving to the gym or having a glass of water when you wake up every morning, become hard-wired into the brain, and you’ll start doing them without thinking. That’s when the real change begins to take place.
