The New Year’s Workout Craze

As the year comes to an end, it’s a great time to detach from the day-to-day grind, reflect on the past year, and look forward to what lies ahead. A lot of common goals set for the next year have to do with health and fitness. Whether your goal is to lose weight or to accomplish a specific fitness goal, the New Year is a great time to evaluate what you find most important. Before you get started, there are a few things to keep in mind.

Be reasonable with yourself. If you set a goal to lose 100 pounds, that’s a tall task. Maybe losing that much weight is a good long-term goal, but if you’re just getting started, let’s get those first ten pounds off first. Setting big goals is a good thing if you give yourself an appropriate amount of time to achieve them. They can also be so demoralizing that it prevents the accomplishment of the smaller milestones between where you are now and the ultimate goal, so be sure to set reasonable expectations.

Be consistent. We’ve all been witness to the overzealous New Year’s resolutioner. Don’t let yourself down by not being all in on your goal. If you follow the guidance in the previous paragraph, you have set reasonable expectations for yourself. You know what you need to do to meet them; now it’s time to just make it happen. Follow through and do those things you know you must do to achieve your desired results. Stick with it. The most important commitments are the ones you make to yourself.

Be relentless. You have everything you need to accomplish your goal, whatever it may be. It’s not complicated, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. If you’ve created a goal worth it’s salt, it will be challenging to accomplish, and that’s ok. If it weren’t challenging, it wouldn’t be worth doing. You will eventually have to decide to do what is hard and attain your desired result, or to give into temptation and to sacrifice your goal for some immediate gratification.

Be flexible. There may be a reason you can’t make progress toward your goal on a given day, that’s ok too. Let’s say your goal is to work out for one hour every day. What do you do if you miss a day? You technically cannot meet your goal now. A lot of people throw in the towel at this point and say they’ll try again next year. The right move is to get back to it as soon as you can. Maybe you can adjust your goal to track how many days you can go without missing a day.

A lot of gym-goers hate the January rush in the gym. There is this arrogant thought that the people that are established in the gym have more of a right to use the equipment than the newcomer. As annoying as it is to have to wait a little longer to use the piece of equipment I want in January, I also love it. I love it because I see a group of people that are out there in the arena attempting to make themselves better. By February the crowds usually subside, but every year a few people stick with it and change the course of their lives. The only question is will you be one of those few?