While increasing your fitness and health by joining a gym is a good idea, not everyone enjoys working out. Unfortunately, even for those who enjoy physical activity, the monotony of regular gym sessions can wear anyone down.

You can get fit without joining a gym by taking a class or picking up a physically active hobby, but a gym often provides the best resources for getting started on a fitness routine. With that in mind, we’ve compiled a list of suggestions for improving your regular gym routine so that you can spend less time there and get more out of it.

Have Goals

Setting fitness goals ahead of time is a great way to improve your time at the gym and make it more interesting. Knowing what you want to get out of your time at the gym will help you stay more focused and keep going even when you don’t want to. Your drive will be a lot stronger.

Make sure your goals aren’t too big or too far away when you set them. When you do this, it’s much harder to see progress, which can be discouraging. Make short-term goals instead, like wanting to lose a certain amount of weight in a month or being able to row farther on the rowing machine by a certain date in the near future. Once you achieve or even surpass these goals, you can move on to the next one and so on, always getting better and enjoying the results.

Make A Workout Plan

Some people find working out at the gym boring or don’t get the results they want because they don’t know how to use the equipment or what to use it for. They might start, but then get stuck because they don’t know what to do next or are afraid to try something new in front of other people.

Make a workout plan to deal with this problem. This way, you can make sure you’re using everything correctly and that you know what to do when you’re done with one set and need to move on to the next. Make sure the plan is also flexible. Other people in the gym might be using the equipment you need to use, so you might have to change things up. Talk to a pro if you don’t know how to do this. This is especially important if you are getting physiotherapy or another treatment, for example, because you need to know what equipment you can use and what you should stay away from, so you don’t hurt yourself.

Keep Track of Your Progress

Lack of motivation can be the reason you don’t like going to the gym and need to change things. There are many ways to add this extra layer, but one of the best is to keep track of your progress over time.

Start right now by writing down your stats. This could include things like your weight, how long and how fast you can run, and how much weight you can lift. Measure yourself again at the end of every month to see how far you’ve come. As you see how far you’ve come, you’ll want to keep going and enjoy the process.

To make this easier, it is worthwhile investing in an Apple Watch so you can get your stats in real time. Although these watches are often used for communication and notifications, if you look into their history, you’ll find they have plenty of health perks too.

Drink Coffee Before You Work Out

This might seem like a strange suggestion, but drinking a cup of coffee before your workout at the gym can be a game changer.

A cup of coffee before a workout helps wake up your central nervous system, giving you a little more energy for your indoor cycling or boot camp class or whatever else it might be that you are going to do. Plus, research shows that it can improve your performance and make exercise more fun, which makes you more likely to work harder. Give it a half hour to start working before you start doing any exercise.

Put Your Phone on Airplane Mode

Fight the urge to respond to the group text you’re in or check the message you received on Snapchat. In order to make the most of this time that you get to spend on yourself, you should put your phone in airplane mode so that it doesn’t distract you from your workout. Even better? Leave your phone in the locker room if you don’t need it for your workout music or any of the apps that go along with it (again, your Apple Watch can help here and be a perfect substitute). The workout photos can wait until later.