With every New Year comes an opportunity to reflect and plan for a fresh, new chapter of life. This is a time to welcome change and other opportunities, typically with the goal of bettering oneself. Most of us know this as creating a “New Year’s resolution.” While resolutions may be anything, the majority of resolution makers (90%) have some sort of health, fitness or weight-loss goal in mind. Unfortunately, data suggest that only 10%–12% of all resolutioners will experience success in their goals — and just over 20% still believe their resolutions will last beyond four
weeks.
Over 150 million people will fail at their resolutions, just to pick them up and try again next year. While the odds may be against you, this year you’re not going to be one of those 150 million people. You’re going to be a part of the 10%–12% who achieve their health and fitness resolutions with these seven tips!
Find an expert coach
An expert coach is what most people need to achieve their goals; however, an expert coach is not just a personal trainer. An expert coach is a person who is willing to be your mentor, your guide and your accountability partner through your fitness journey. An expert coach is not just a typical gym-goer who may (or may not) have had some success; an expert coach is preferably someone who has studied human exercise and physiology, someone who has a successful track record with a variety of clients and someone who realizes you’re the hero on this journey, not them. They’re simply the guide leading you down the path of positive health and fitness.
Don’t create too many changes too quickly
There are many components that go into improving health and fitness. Not only should you exercise; you should also consume a healthy diet, have a healthy sleep schedule, eliminate or reduce life’s stressors and be genuinely happy. I suggest choosing one category every 4–8 weeks and focus solely on improving that category.
Realize this is not temporary; this is for a lifetime
Your current state of health, also known as baseline health, was not created overnight. Your baseline health is a direct reflection on how you’ve spent the weeks, months and years leading up to this point. Now, I’d assume that if you’re reading this article, you have some aspirations of improving your health; I’d also assume that you haven’t deliberately tried to live in poor health. While years of unintentional poor choices may have brought you to this point, months of intentional improvements can move mountains in your health-and-fitness journey.
Build social support
It’s easy to quit when we’re not letting anyone down but ourselves. However, when we have a group of people supporting us and expecting us to achieve our goals, it’s harder to quit. I mentioned above that 95% of all New Year’s resolution makers have some sort of health-and-fitness goal in mind. Find these people and build your social support system. Hold one another accountable and constantly remind one another why you started this journey.
Do just “one more”
The “just do one more” mindset has saved more people from quitting then I can even count, and it’s simple. When you don’t feel like working out, do just one more workout. When you don’t feel like eating another healthy meal, eat just one more healthy meal. When you don’t feel like doing that daily walk, do just one more walk. When you don’t feel like doing the daily tasks to achieve your goals, do just one more task and just one more day of work. Doing “just one more” breaks the journey down into small steppingstones, and if you stay on those stones, you will be successful.
Have a plan
While everything above is essential to achieving your goals, each of the tips needs a plan that must be executed. A goal without a plan is just a dream; inversely, a goal with a plan will create weekly and monthly objectives, and objectives are trackable. I like to recommend creating monthly objectives that may only be obtained through successfully completing your daily tasks, and these daily tasks are called your key results. Your key results will be the daily tasks that you need to accomplish in order to complete your monthly objective, and your monthly objectives will lead you to accomplishing your big goal.
Enjoy the process
If you’ve ever earned something, I mean really earned it, you know that there’s no better way to obtain anything. Having things or opportunities given to you may be great, and may be easy, but when you earn something, you remember every ounce of effort and sacrifice that you had made to obtain it. That process of what it took to obtain that thing was more valuable then actually obtaining whatever it is that you received; that’s how I want you to view this process. The process is what’s going to make you into the person you want to be, not the outcome. Enjoy every failure, enjoy every lesson, enjoy learning and enjoy living!
While there are many other tips and tricks that I could offer for your journey, these seven I believe to be some of the most important, and if you get good at these, you are well on your way to accomplishing that New Year’s resolution! If you’re ready to make that resolution, I want to hear from you. I encourage you to email me your big goals and resolutions; I want to see them broken down into monthly objectives and weekly key results. This is your time to become the best version of you! CS
Editor’s note: Cody Revel is the founder of The Athlete Academy, a training facility with locations in Fruitland and Berlin for adults and athletes to achieve their health and performance goals. Revel has 12-plus years of experience in the fitness-and-humanperformance industry.
The Athlete Academy, Performance & Fitness / 443-358-6132 / AthleteAcademyMD.com