Image Credit – Pixabay
It’s a new year so it’s going to be a new us. (Sensing a theme yet?) We bought new workout clothes, found a gym near the house/office, and we’re full of fire and determination. It’s gonna work. Now’s the time. Carpe Diem!
Of course, it will. It worked for us last year, right? We had the clothes and shoes and a gym membership or found the PERFECT app. We were ready to go. What happened? By February we had given up. Life got in the way. We didn’t adjust and got steamrolled. Maybe we went too hard out of the gate getting burned out quickly. Maybe one, “I’ll get it tomorrow,” turned into two or three and then it was all over. It could have been any number of things but the point is we didn’t keep it going.
But it’s a new year and another chance to start over. We want to be successful this year making it the best year ever for us. But where do we start? How do we ensure we don’t fall into the same traps we do every year? Here are a few tips and tricks I find helpful.
Make Goals Specific and Attainable: Inevitably, every year people create nebulous New Year’s Resolutions of losing weight, going to the gym, or getting healthy. While these are great in theory they are vague and unhelpful. There is too much wiggle room and no way of knowing if we meet or fail at our goals. These “goals” are not measurable.
We need to add specificity to our goals. Instead of “losing weight” make it “I want to lose 10 lbs by the end of February.” Change “I want to go to the gym,” to “I want to go to the gym 3 mornings a week for 30 minutes, rotating between upper and lower body workouts, for the next 6 weeks.” Go from “I want to get healthy” to “I will reduce my soda intake to 3 times per week for the next month,” or “I will cook 3 paleo meals a week, for dinner, for the next month.”
See the difference? We made them specific: losing 10lbs, going to the gym 3x per week, and making a specific lifestyle change instead of a general one. They are also measurable. We either meet our weekly goal or don’t. Lastly, we’ve built in a time frame giving us an end goal to shoot for rather than a vague time frame of… whenever.
They should also be attainable. Want to lose 30 lbs in a month? I’m sure it can be done for those who don’t like eating and are on the show Survivor. Planning on working out or running every day for 2 plus hours? Hopefully, we were a bodybuilder or marathon runner in a previous life. Deciding to go strict Paleo, cutting out all our favorite foods, cold turkey. I pray we have the willpower. The problem is these aren’t attainable for the average person. We need to start with smaller more manageable goals. Most people can lose 1-2 lbs safely per week, 30 minutes to an hour at the gym 3 times per week is sufficient for general health, and removing foods slowly can make the change more sustainable.
I know we aren’t working to be average or “most” people but we need to start somewhere and remember getting “healthy” is a marathon, not a sprint.
We Can’t Out-Train Our Diet: If we run one more mile we can go get McDonalds or ice cream or whatever tasty treat our hearts desire. The problem is we can’t out-train our diets. If we work out in the morning then eat like shit all day, we will likely have a surplus of calories which only adds to the scale. This can easily become discouraging making it easier and easier to give up.
Jeff Godin Ph.D., CSCS, SGX wrote a post for the Spartan Race website which highlights this concept perfectly. As he lays it out, it’s easy to see how many burpees someone would need to complete to work off these various delicious items. For example, to work off one slice of Domino’s Pepperoni Pizza I would need to do 161 burpees. I hate doing 1 let alone another 160 of them.
This doesn’t mean we need to give up everything we love but if we want to meet our goals, changes will need to be made. Trade a glass of water for the usual can of soda, or two. Make an extra healthy meal at home rather than eating out. Buy the small “hundred calorie snack pack” instead of the full-size container of the same snack. By making smaller changes to our diet we can set ourselves up for greater success than going cold turkey.
That being said, some of us might have difficulty with moderation. (I’m pointing at myself pretty hard right now). I tend to be an all or nothing kind of person. I know this about myself and I’ve learned to be okay with it. For those of us who need to go cold turkey to make these changes in our life pick one thing at a time. Remove soda, cookies, or ice cream one at a time rather than cutting out ALL sugar at once. Once we master the removal of one item we can move to the next.
Figuring Out Where We Belong: I wrote about Fitness Communities a couple weeks back so I won’t beat it up too much here. The important thing I recently learned is, for most of us, it doesn’t matter what kind of fitness regimen we follow we just need to follow one. There are tons of different ways to work out and fitness sub-communities to belong to out there. It’s important to try a few to see which one sticks.
For years, I tried many different ways to get “in shape.” It’s was until recently I realized I wasn’t a fan of the cardio based workouts like running, spin, or high-intensity interval training (HIIT). They filled me with dread every time I needed to work out. This was why I found it difficult to stick with CrossFit. I enjoyed the lifting but the circuit training scared me so I would skip more classes than I’d go. Now I only lift and I love it.
In comparison, I have a friend who recently found HIIT training through a company called D1. She wanted to get her kids physically active and decided to join with them. SHE LOVES IT and can’t get enough! Every week she tells me how difficult it was and how much fun she had doing it. She’s figured out where she belongs and her life is changing because of it.
Another friend of mine is running a 100-mile marathon in April. He’s been training for the last year and can’t wait. He loves doing the long endurance training but could care less about lifting anything more than his bottle of kombucha. Both sound exhausting and unappealing to me but exciting to them.
We have a tendency to follow the new fitness crazy or go along with what everyone else says we should do. Unfortunately, we ignore our personal goals to follow other people. Take some time, experiment, and find the right fit to keep the fitness train running.
Keep it Simple Silly (Stupid feels so Angry): Every time I decide to get back into fitness I usually spend a ton of time looking through different workout routines. I delve into sites like BodyBuilding.com, Men’s Health, or individual fitness “leaders” workout regimens to see what’s out there and to find my new routine. It’s doesn’t take me long to get overwhelmed by all of the information out there and the complexity of each routine. Each workout programs about 5-10 exercises per day, 5-days a week. They take forever and soon I’m too frustrated to continue.
Everything changed when I found Jim Wendler’s 5/3/1 program. It was SO SIMPLE! Later I found Starting Strength and Stronglifts 5×5 which were even less complicated. I’m using Stronglifts 5×5 right now and I’m finished within 45 minutes.
This led me to realize how difficult we make fitness on ourselves. We believe we need to find programs with an unnecessary number of exercises programmed in them but it’s not true. There are better ways and, depending on the community, it can be really simple.
For those of us who are looking to work out at home or alone there are plenty of apps to choose. I’ve mentioned a few free ones before like Running for Weight Loss or Zombies, Run for runners, Hylete’s Daily Circuit for HIIT training, and StrongLifts 5×5 for strength training. There are plenty more of these in the App Store. Those of us who prefer working with a partner or with a group most gyms have free classes or Personal Trainers, there’s CrossFit or other functional fitness gyms, Yoga, or Fitness Boot Camps.
The point is unless we plan to geek out on fitness, letting someone else do the grunt work for us is a good thing. This way we can sit back, relax (but still get at it), and enjoy the fitness ride. By making it more difficult on ourselves, the less likely we are to continue.
Don’t forget to rest: When we start any new habit there is always the fear of backsliding. It takes 21 days for a habit to stick, right? Not necessarily. According to the author SJ Scott, it can take up to 66 days, depending on the person, for a new habit to stick with us.
When we start a new fitness habit we feel we need to go all in every day to ensure our routine sticks. (We don’t need a rest day. We just had 365 of them). Then what happens? After a couple of days of working out, we get too sore to continue. Then we take a day or two or three to rest and recover which turns into a week or more. Now we are in pain, pissed at ourselves, and quit. We figure this fitness thing isn’t for us and we move on with our lives.
We didn’t give ourselves enough time to rest. Our New Year’s vigor created an all or nothing mentality, which told us not to slow down and we listened. We need to remember it’s okay to rest. It’s okay to slow down. It’s okay to get our bodies’ use to this new level of physical activity. We should put our heart into our workouts and give it our all, but burnout is really easy to do, especially early in our training. Again we are looking for sustainability over the long run and ensuring our bodies successfully recovers is essential.
Bringing it Home: Phew… Still with me? Alright! I’m going to end it with this recap. First, we need to make specific, yet attainable, goals we can measure to know we are making progress, not go off our feelings. Second, our diet is more important than physical exercise. If we are consistently eating like garbage we won’t be able to burn off enough calories to make see a difference. Third, we need to find the type of fitness which makes us excited to get out of bed. Don’t know what it is yet? Experiment. Fourth, KISS it! We want to make it as easy as possible to get excited about exercising regularly. Fifth, do not forget to rest. Our body’s need time to heal and recover to maintain progress. Lastly (and a bonus), slow and steady will win this race. We are participating in a marathon, figuratively but possibly literally, not a sprint.
There it is. I hope you are as excited as I am to start the new year off right. Leave a comment and let me know what you think. Are you planning on using any of these? Were these tips helpful? Keep me posted and good luck.
*Didn’t get enough in this article and want more ideas to make your fitness goals stick? Check out these Nerd Fitness articles: The 10 Key Differences Between Weight Loss Success and Failure, How to Build Healthy Habits that Stick, How to Build a Batcave for Habit Change. Enjoy!