Stick to Your New Year's Fitness Resolutions

1. Make sure this resolution is important to you.

It’s rare that a fitness target is just about getting in shape. Whether it’s about bringing more structure to your life, improving your mental health, getting better sleep, feeling a sense of achievement after completing a workout, or any other reason, your new year fitness motivations must be personal to you. Don’t do it because everyone else is doing new years resolutions.

Once you find this reason, use it as an anchor whenever you’re feeling non-committal, and if it’s a strong enough reason, it’ll bring you back on track. It’s certainly a great start. 

2. Be very clear about your goals and when you plan to achieve them.

Goal setting is a powerful process for thinking about your ideal future, and for motivating yourself to turn your vision of this future into reality.

By knowing precisely what you want to achieve, you know where you have to concentrate your efforts. You'll also quickly spot the distractions.

Make your plan as real as possible with a clear set of goals, a certain target whether that be how much weight you want to lose, personal best, rep count, or anything else that gets you excited, and when you want to reach it.

3. Find ways to keep yourself accountable.

A good way of keeping on track with a New Years’ resolution is to find a method for keeping track of your workouts, or more importantly, the times when you aren’t working out. One way of doing this is by hiring a personal trainer to keep you on track, or talking to your friends about your resolutions and goals.

It won’t need to be many, just a couple of friends, preferably ones that also have resolutions, so you can check in on each other and feel accountable for how committed you are to your goals.

If you don’t feel like talking to others about it, you could also keep a fitness plan diary, and in getting in the practice of filling out your workout, you’ll also realise when you aren’t training as regularly as you were previously. 

4. Stay on track with how you are progressing.

Keeping a measurement of how you are progressing will play an important role in your New Year’s fitness routine.

Making yourself stay disciplined by getting out and about for your workout is of course very important, but if you don’t make a note of your progression, it will be hard to know if you are truly keeping on track with your targets. 

Progress photos, keeping a diary with measurements of your hips, waist, chest arms, and your weight works really well.

5. Do what you can to make it fun!

Again, the drive of getting in great shape will initially be enough to keep you exercising, but there might come a time where it will be harder to come by on certain days. As you decide on your fitness plan and the targets involved, also try to incorporate ways to make it as enjoyable as possible.

Whether it’s a weekly podcast, while you do cardio, a music playlist that you can add to with every session, different types of workouts for each week so you don’t get bored, or a friend you only see for training, make sure your exercise is as much about the fun side as it is about the fitness side.