5 Fitness Plan New Year’s Resolutions You Can Keep the Whole Year
We all do it. We make those dreaded overly-ambitious New Year’s resolutions. Under the influence of too much eggnog and cozy fireplaces, most anything seems possible. Even though most of us fail to meet our goals in the very first week of the New Year! But those resolutions can be easy to keep. That is, if we make a fitness plan we can actually stick to.
Want to look back at 2016 as the year you actually did everything you resolved to do? Then start here, with an achievable fitness plan designed to get you off the couch and keep you moving toward your goals.
- Identify your goal: We often make those vague resolutions that are easy to cheat on or give up altogether. But if we make them more resolute, it’s going to be easier to keep them. What is the goal of your fitness plan? To lose weight? Build muscle? Run a marathon? Once you identify your specific fitness goals, you’ll be much more inclined to stick with it than if you just resolve to “go to the gym more.”
- Create a workable schedule: If you tell yourself you’re going to get up at 5 am every day and hit the gym, you best not be one of those late-night Netflix bingers who stays up until 2 am. Make a schedule you can and will keep. And give yourself room to grow into a new fitness plan too. It might be more achievable to say you’ll hit the gym 2 days a week if your current visits are sporadic or zero. Then you can start going more frequently once you’re in the swing of things.
- Avoid the rut: Predictability can be the death of any fitness plan. Knowing what comes next can put us on autopilot and make us work less toward our goal. So maybe you need a bit of variety: spin class on Tuesdays, going for a run in a new part of town on Thursdays, and a yoga class on Sunday. There are endless ways to mix up a workout at the gym, too. Do what you need to do to keep things fresh and exciting, particularly if you’re prone to get burned out or bored easily.
- Enlist a buddy: It may seem kind of desperate to get a friend on board with you, but it’s actually one of the best ways to stick to a fitness plan, especially if you both have similar goals. It makes all the work and the rewards that much more meaningful if you’re sharing the experience.
- Schedule a reassessment: You won’t know if your fitness plan is working until you’ve been at it for a while—at least a few weeks. And if this is all new to you, setting up time to check in with yourself is really crucial, even if you’re just ticking up the number of workouts by one a week. So, set a time—about 6 weeks into the New Year to get real with yourself. How is the workout schedule working out—both for your fitness goals and the rest of your life? Do you need to move anything around? Are the classes or workouts working for your fitness goals? Is there anything you need to adjust? Setting up the time to reevaluate your fitness plan removes the “I failed” on meeting the New Year’s resolutions. But it’s also not a built-in cop out. It’s one of the best tools to keep you going—the opportunity to adjust and keep moving forward successfully.
Image: Ludovic Rouchy Photography
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