With working in the personal training and fitness industry, I feel like I’ve been involved in a lot of discussions recently about New Year’s fitness goals and resolutions. This made me think about just how effective, useful and motivating resolutions are for people. Obviously New Year’s resolutions aren’t all about health and exercise goals but I’m going to focus on talking about those that are. I really think it depends on the type of person you are as to how helpful they are for you. Some people find it really motivating to have a goal to work towards and it helps them to push themselves in their exercise and give them structure to their weekly workouts. For others the resolution becomes more of a stress and can often feel overwhelming, especially if you’ve set yourself a particularly challenging or unrealistic goal. In exercise terms I’ve often seen that this pressure has a negative impact on people’s efforts, especially if they feel that they are not where they should be by a certain point or are taking longer than expected to reach their goal. This is why I think that it’s so important to make a fitness/exercise resolution that is realistic and achievable and to go into the New Year with a positive mindset whilst also acknowledging that it could be a little more challenging and take a little longer than expected.
Let’s say your goal is to lose 1% body fat within 5 weeks. For some people this is hugely motivating and will mean that they spring into action with exercising regularly and eating well consistently and they will achieve their goal in the set amount of time. For most of us unfortunately it’s not that simple. Although the good intentions are there, you may have a bad or hectic week when exercising is the last thing on your mind or maybe you spend and evening or two stuffing yourself with the leftover chocolate from Christmas. For a lot of people having that pressure of having the resolution in the back of your mind whilst half way through a bar of Cadbury’s just results in you feeling incredibly guilty and giving up completely on your goal. It’s very normal to have slip ups along the way to reaching your goals but the key is to not let these put you off achieving what you want to achieve! Instead of feeling sorry for yourself accept that you’ve had a bad day or two and start a fresh the following day – get back onto the healthy eating and down to the gym or out in the fresh air and start focusing on that goal again. I guess that’s so many people have Personal Trainers like myself to motivate them and to ensure that they get back on track even when they feel negative about progress or lose sight of their goal at times.
It’s very rare to have a smooth journey to achieve your resolutions without any hiccups at all along the way (especially with health and fitness related ones), after all you’ve set it as a resolution for a reason. Even if it takes you a little longer than 5 weeks to lose that 1% body fat, it doesn’t matter at all. The main thing is to remain positive and get yourself back on track even after a slip up, no matter how big or small it is. So don’t let New Year’s resolutions get you down, accept that health, fitness and exercise related goals are challenging to achieve but don’t let that put you off working towards something that you really want to do in 2016.