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So you want to get fit and develop a regular exercise habit, but you are concerned that you may find it hard to maintain your motivation?

Here are three tips to help you make the most of your new found enthusiasm.

1. Measure where you are now. Like any journey, you need to know your current location on the fitness chart before you know where you will go. Preferably with the help of a fitness instructor, take a measure of your current state of fitness. How far can you comfortably run? How many repetitions can you do? At what weight level? Write down all of your current capabilities on a grid under the heading Day One.
2. Map out your next six weeks. Maintaining discipline in the early days is extremely important. Your motivation will come naturally later, when you have seen the benefits, but at the beginning it is important to make a plan and stick to it. Decide which days you will be going to the gym or going running and add these to the grid. Allow yourself a day or two in between each session to give your muscles a chance to recover and grow.
3. Each exercise day, increase your effort by no more than two or three percent. For example: if you were able to run half a mile on Day One, add just a couple of hundred yards on Day Two and then again the next day. Similarly, add one repetition to each weight exercise. So if you started at 10 repetitions, do eleven on Day Two, twelve on Day Three, etc. When you get to fifteen, you can drop back to ten but increase the weight by a small amount. Next time you get to fifteen, drop back to ten, retain the same weight, but rest for thirty seconds and then do a second set of ten and so on. If you find that your increment has been too much and you are struggling with the weight or the distance, reduce it a little until it is stretching you but still within your comfort zone.

These slow increments may not seem like much, but when you get to the end of two weeks and look back you will be surprised at what you can now do that was impossible for you previously. If you run a mile on your first day and just run two hundred yards more each time you go out, you'll have doubled your distance in two weeks!

Always remember that you are not competing with some super fit athlete. You are competing with the person you were yesterday. If you can beat that person, by just a little bit, every day, you are making great progress.