Being in the habit of exercising is not only great for your overall health, but it’s also great for your skin.

Working up a sweat helps to heal your skin in 4 key ways:

1.  It increases your circulation. This means that more oxygen is delivered to your skin cells and waste products are carried away more easily.

2.  It helps to manage your stress. Stress is well known to aggravate skin complaints. Exercise releases endorphins, which are chemicals in the brain that boost your happiness and reduce your stress.

3.  It promotes restful sleep. Sleep is the time when our body repairs and regenerates, which is exactly what we need to heal our skin.

4.  It keeps your digestive system in tip-top shape. We know that skin complaints are often caused by problems in the gut. Moving our body helps our digestive system to move too.

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Finding the time to exercise might seem like an impossible task. Don’t worry though, exercise is easy when you’re in the habit of exercising.

One of my favourite quotes is from Gretchen Rubin in her book Better than Before. It’s a whole book dedicated to making and breaking habits. My kind of read!

A habit is something that you do regularly, often without thinking about it. Healthy people have healthy habits. It really is as simple as that.

Let’s look at how to start your exercise habit.

The power of daily habits

I’m all for setting massive goals and really going after them. We should be ambitious and realise our dreams. But we shouldn’t underestimate the power of small daily habits.

For example, think of your breakfast. Eating sausages, bacon, fried eggs, beans, and hash browns once in a while is not going to have much of an impact on your health. If you eat this for breakfast every day though, you’ll put on weight, clog your arteries and likely shorten your life span.

It works the same way with exercise. Trekking up Everest once in your life is not going to make much of a difference to how fit your body is. Walking for 15 minutes every day will.

From now on, you are a person that exercises. Perhaps you’ve been a person that doesn’t exercise. Perhaps you’ve been that person for a long time. But no longer.

Here are 2 easy ways to get into the habit of exercising:

1. The 2-minute rule

When something is easy to do, we’re more likely to do it. Exercising for 2 minutes is easy. From now on, every single day, you will do 2 minutes of exercise. This can be a 60 second plank morning and night, 2 minutes running on the spot, 1 minute of sit-ups and 1 minute of squats or 2 minutes dancing like a crazy person in the living room with your kids.

It doesn’t matter what exercise you do, the important thing is that you do it. Don’t focus on trimming your waist, sculpting your abs or running a 5k. The important thing, for now, is to show up consistently.

You’ll soon find that a few days a week your 2 minutes becomes 5 minutes and 5 minutes becomes 15 minutes. When this happens, great, but you must still stick to your 2 minutes every day. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking I did 6 minutes today so I can skip it for the next 2 days. All that will happen is that your 2 days will become 2 weeks and you’ll be out of the habit of doing daily exercise. Remember, what you do every day has a greater impact than what you do once in a while.

Once you’re in the habit of exercising you can then set yourself more challenging goals and focus on the results you want to achieve.

That said, if you’re the type of person that is more motivated by a big change rather than smaller incremental steps, then go ahead and sign yourself up for that 5k and get going!

2. Tie your new habit to an existing one

Another way of sticking to a new exercise habit is to tie exercise to something that you already do consistently. This way you don’t have to find a whole heap of new time to fit exercise in. You already know when you’re going to exercise. You’re more likely to be consistent with your exercise because you’re already consistent with your existing habit.

Here are some examples:

• You’re in the habit of sitting down to watch your favourite TV show. Make it your new habit that you’ll exercise during the first half of the show then relax during the second half.
• You meet your friend Jane every Saturday morning for coffee for the hour that the kids are at gymnastics. Make it your new habit that you and Jane walk around the park for the first 30 minutes then drink coffee for the next 30 minutes.
• Sunday morning is family time. Make it your new habit that every Sunday you all go for a walk. You can go to the beach, walk through the woods, up a hill or around the park.

Once you get into the habit of exercising, you’ll no longer have to think about it. You’ll just do it and you’ll love how amazing it is to feel fit and healthy.