Achieving arm tone doesn’t have to be an uphill battle for you. Unfortunately for me, It was an uphill battle.

The most frustrating part of the whole arm tone process was ever-changing levels of motivation. No matter how hard I tried, I could not maintain a high level of focus and desire for extended periods of time.

At times I would feel so unmotivated that I would simply ditch the whole effort all together. And my consolation was an endless consumption of cookies.

One day I had a wake-up call and realized that if I couldn’t figure out a way to stick with a program for the long run, I would never be able to get sexy arms. And I also knew that this motivational “yo yoing” wasn’t sustainable.

As a result, I began searching for a way to maintain motivation and adherence to a program. The answer to my prayers was Dr David Burns MD. He created a method that revolved around the avoidance of cognitive distortions.

So without further ado, here are three distortions you should avoid so that your arm tone motivation never fades:

1. Perfectionism distortions. If you see things as black or white then you have this distortion. For example, if you have to have a perfect workout or no workout at all then you suffer from perfectionism. Don’t sweat the small stuff and always keep moving forward despite minute setbacks. In other words, focus on general patterns of improvement.

2. Over generalizing distortions. This one is based on the faulty assumption that if something happened to you in the past it will keep on happening again and again in the future. You may tell yourself, for instance, that since you haven’t been able to lose weight in the past you will never be able to lose weight in the future and every program out there simply won’t work for you.

3. Mental-filters distortions. This one his horrible because it forces you to focus on the negative instead of the positive. If you have a solid day of healthy eating, but slightly veer off and have a small amount of junk food you only focus on the junk food. But what about all the other healthy food you ate? Always give yourself credit for the positive.

Keep the above distortions in mind and make sure you avoid them at all costs. Doing so will allow you to win the mental “arm tone” war. In the end, the person with the highest level of motivation always wins.

More importantly, however, is to develop the habit of rapid action. After all, this information will be useless unless you act on it quickly.

Author Katherine Crawford M.S., a Harvard exercise expert and recent arm fat victim, is an expert on exercises for flabby arms for women. Discover how to get sexy and toned arms right now by exploring her website on arm flab.