Suffering from lack of self-confidence? You are not alone. Thankfully, there are ways to boost your self confidence and one of the most effective ways is through exercise. In this blog post, we will discuss seven ways exercise boosts your self confidence.
What is self confidence?
Before you can get better at something, you have to understand what it is. Confidence is not the feeling you get when you’ve made it in life. Self-confidence is the mindset you need in order to make it in life. It means you accept and trust yourself throughout the process.
It is simply believing in oneself.
Confidence is an attitude and the result of consistent actions. If you don’t understand this, you’ll never be confident. What you practice, you become. It can be looked at like a muscle. Similarly to how you would regularly exercise your muscles and consistently push your limits to become stronger, you have to constantly push yourself to do hard things to develop confidence. The more you work at it, the stronger it will become.
If you don’t exercise your self-confidence you won’t be able to live fully and reach your potential because self-doubt will hold you back. You will forever be tied to society’s version of beauty instead of having the confidence to create your own definition of beauty and be your true, sexy, confident self.
You need to believe in yourself, know your value, and own your voice in order to succeed. That is not something some of us are born with and others aren’t. It is a skill that can be learned. If you had parents that encouraged you always it may come easier but if you had parents who constantly criticized you (like I did) then it takes work.
So, if you want to grow your self confidence, exercise that confidence muscle. Make yourself a priority in life. Invest in yourself. Self confidence allows you to take risks. Remember, the bigger the risk, the bigger the reward.
What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?
7 Ways Exercise Boosts Your Self-Confidence
The best way to start your journey toward a more confident you is to work out regularly. Not only will you improve your physical fitness and mental health, you will also be building courage to do hard things with every drop of sweat. Exercise boosts confidence. Here are seven reasons why:
1. Exercise makes you look and feel better.
When you’re in good shape, you feel better about yourself and your body. How you feel about your appearance greatly impacts your habits. When you don’t like the way you look, you’d rather hide out in a corner than run out to conquer the world and achieve your dreams.
Regular exercise improves your physical health, increases muscle mass, decreases body fat percentage, and makes you look, and feel, healthy and fit. When you are proud of your appearance, you feel more self assured. With your confidence high, you are much more likely to take the necessary risks to exercise that confidence muscle and achieve your goals.
2. Exercise releases endorphins.
Have you ever wondered why you feel so good after you exercise?Working out releases endorphins in your body, which are hormones that make you feel good. These happy hormones have similar effects to morphine without any of the risk of addiction. Endorphins, especiallybeta endorphins, can improve your mood and significantly increase feelings of well-being. This positive perception of life will continue even after your workout ends.
So, a high intensity exercise in the morning isn’t just good for your blood pressure, muscle tone and physical health. It is also a great way to start your day with a positive attitude. Positive attitudes produce positive habits. Confidence is a habit practiced daily.
3. Exercise helps you achieve goals.
When you set and achieve goals, it gives you a sense of accomplishment, proving that you are capable of doing hard things. You streamline from fitness, the mindset and work ethics into real life. This proof boosts your self confidence and encourages you to keep pushing yourself. Reaching goals also makes you feel good thanks to anotherhappy brain chemical, dopamine. This positive reinforcement gives you the drive and motivation to set and achieve more goals in other areas of your life. And we can’t forget Testosterone, which is the single most important hormone that makes men confident and gives them drive. Women have lesser amounts but we create more of it with intense exercise.
Exercise is full of goal setting. Let’s use weight lifting as an example. Let’s say you plan to complete 15 reps. At the end of rep 12, you can feel your muscles burning. The sweat is dripping down your forehead and you really, REALLY want to stop. But, you don’t. You push yourself to make it to the end and achieve your goal.
At the end of your strength training session, your body may ache from the torture you just put it through but your mind is being bathed in feel good chemicals. This burst of dopamine and endorphins makes us want to set more goals so that we can keep achieving them and feel the same reward.
4. Exercise pushes you to try new things.
We’ve already seen that exercise makes your brain and your body very happy. However, if you do the same thing day after day, eventually you get bored. Your brain starts to release less happy chemicals after your workout because it’s not new and exciting anymore.
A great way to build self confidence is by adding new activities to your exercise repertoire. If your regular exercise regime is a mixture of spinning and weight lifting, add in some yoga, tai chi, pole dancing, running or any kind of aerobic exercise that interests you. By taking small risks and trying new exercises, you are building your confidence and preparing yourself to take larger risks in the future.
5. Exercise makes you stronger, both mentally and physically.
Although this one is probably pretty obvious, exercise makes you stronger. When you accomplish something that is physically challenging, it gives you a sense of accomplishment and builds your self confidence. Exercise is like a simulation of a stressful moment and it prepares your mind for real life stress after the workouts.
Overcoming any physical challenge requires just as much mental stamina as it does physical strength. The more you “work out” your mind, the stronger it becomes. This improved mental strength will carry over into other areas of your life, making you more confident in everything that you do.
6. Exercise improves your quality of life.
We all know that physical exercise is good for our bodies. However, it is also agreat tool for your mind. Following a regular exercise routine is proven to lower stress and decrease feelings of anxiety and depression. Exercising gives you more energy, increased focus, and better sleep. Basically, if you want to enjoy life to the fullest, exercise needs to be a regular part of your routine.
7 . Confidence is contagious.
That very same confidence you’ve built up through exercise will trickle down into the rest of your life. Because you know you can kill it at the gym, you will be willing to push yourself to do hard things in other aspects of your life.
Confidence can help you develop healthier relationships, pursue challenging professional endeavors, and become the sexy, self confident woman you were meant to be.
So what are you waiting for? Get moving and boost your self confidence today!
If you need some extra motivation and guidance, the “Vive Healthy” eBookis a toolkit filled with everything you need to start feeling better about yourself today. It consists of an exercise plan, mindset coaching and ways to replace low self-confidence with sexy confidence.
These tools and techniques have worked for me, and my personal training clients, for over ten years now and they can work for you too. My mission is to give you all the tools you need to get there. Go on and invest in yourself. You deserve to live a life you love.
Remember, the bigger the risk, the bigger the reward!