We all know the excitement of buying new gym gear, signing up for a bunch of intense-sounding classes and promising ourselves that this time we’ll stick to our fitness goals.

But let’s face it, it can be hard to make those daily training sessions a long-term thing. One bad hangover or stressful work week can derail your plans to keep on track with the gym. Before you know it, you’re permanently snoozing the alarm, WhatsApping flimsy excuses to your PT and feeling worse than when you started.

If this sounds familiar, know that you’re not alone: recent stats found that around 40% of gym-goers abandon their workouts within six months of joining the gym, and many more of us bounce between periods of feeling super motivated and months of doing nothing at all. 

But before you give up entirely and decide that fitness just isn’t your thing, there’s a simple trick from TikTok that might help you build a workout routine that sticks. 

In a recent viral video posted on the app, one savvy user said that if you want to start working out this year, you need to do one refreshingly simple thing: treat getting to the gym and doing a workout as two separate habits. “It’s my secret formula for making becoming a gym girlie happen,” she explains.

Want to know more about the hack, what it involves and why it works? We spoke to a leading neurology doctor to understand the science behind this unusual approach. Keep scrolling. 

We’ll begin by stating the obvious: starting a new fitness routine is hard. Those motivational ‘no excuses’ Instagram posts might make it seem as simple as rolling out of bed, but they fail to recognise one key thing: the dozens of micro-habits you need to build before you’ve even stepped foot through the gym door.

Tapping into this long-established habit-setting theory, TikTok user Ashie Adams (@ashieadams) touched on all the tiny but crucial reasons why starting a new fitness routine often fails. 

“When you start working out, actually getting to the gym is 90% of the battle,” she explains. “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.

“Working out is a matter of having the motivation and having the right workout programme. But one cannot exist without the other, so the first habit to develop is just getting to the gym.”

So, she suggests that the first 30 days of any fitness journey should solely focus on just getting to the gym, and nothing more: no ‘75 hard’ challenges, no marathon treadmill efforts. Just getting dressed and showing up. From here, you can start to build up a bigger workout habit over time. 

In his book Atomic Habits, researcher James Clear explains why starting with a small habit – like driving to the gym – is key to forming bigger habits like running 5K every other morning.

“Research shows that willpower is like a muscle,” he explains. “It gets fatigued as you use it throughout the day. [But you can] solve this problem by picking a new habit that is easy enough that you don’t need motivation to do it.”

Basically, habits get easier with each repetition, and real change is made from consistent, small everyday steps.

Dr Faye Begeti, author of The Phone Fix: The Brain-Focused Guide To Building Healthy Digital Habits And Breaking Bad Ones, explains that habits are stored in a primitive part of our brain called the basal ganglia. 

Dr Begeti is a practising neurology doctor and neuroscientist at Oxford University Hospitals who has spent her life researching the science of habit-building and productivity. “It’s in the basal ganglia, or our autopilot region, that habits are built and stored,” she tells Strong Women. “When we try to start a new fitness routine, it tends to require a lot of mental and cognitive effort because we’ve not developed the necessary automated processes around the habit yet.”

Think of it like this: when you start a new job, you have to consider every small thing on your first day, like finding your locker, scoping out the lunch options and timing your commute. But after a while, you tend to fall into a pattern because you’ve stored those automatic processes, which takes away the mental load.  

So, when you see somebody smugly posting a gym selfie, there’s usually a chain of very simple sequences that have led up to it: waking up, packing a bag and filling up the car with petrol or checking the train times. “I call these ‘domino habits’,” says Dr Begeti.

To build a longer habit sequence, she says you just need to get used to ‘pushing that first domino’ without worrying about what happens next – because when there’s too much perceived mental effort, you can psych yourself out of taking action altogether.

This theory matches the experience of the TikTok creator who said: “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. 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.” 

So, we know the key thing is to first get used to starting, which is why Dr Begeti advises trying her ‘five minute rule’.

“When you don’t feel like doing something, just start and tell yourself you’ll do five minutes of work, then see how you feel,” she says. “Often, it’s not physical exhaustion that stops us from going to the gym, but mental fatigue – we don’t want to engage in the effort that it takes to get dressed and organise ourselves.”

If you’ve ever put off a gnawing work deadline until the last minute and then realised that it wasn’t as hard as you first thought, you’ll know this phenomenon all too well. That’s the domino effect in motion, and the five-minute rule can help you to push past the fatigue.  

“Studies show that mental effort peaks just before starting something, then rapidly decreases after,” Dr Begeti says. “People fail to start because they think the effort will increase as they go, but in reality, it decreases once they get going as momentum is in their favour.”

And even if you end up doing five minutes of squats and then giving up entirely? That’s OK too, because you’re still making progress by solidifying those neural connections that associate your early mornings with working out at the gym.

A gentle TikTok fitness trend that doesn’t involve burning ourselves out with non-stop cardio challenges? Count us firmly in.  

Images: Getty