Why willpower is a bad strategy for training consistently
Willpower intuitively feels like the main quality you need to train consistently — 'just push through and go.' But research on self-regulation shows willpower behaves like a limited, depletable resource over the course of a day: the more decisions and self-control someone spends elsewhere in life, the less is left to force themselves to the gym in the evening.
People who train consistently for years, on average, rely less on motivation and more on habit and environment design: a fixed training time, a bag packed in advance, going straight from work instead of stopping home first where it's easy to talk yourself out of it. A habit requires far less conscious willpower than a decision made fresh every single time.
Practical takeaway: instead of relying on motivation, which inevitably fluctuates day to day, it's more effective to design your environment and schedule once so training requires minimal decision-making — then attendance stops depending on how inspired you happen to feel on any given Tuesday.