Written by the Beast Gear team As the New Year approaches, it's time to start thinking about resolutions. If you're like many people, weight loss will be among your New year's resolutions. Indeed, weight loss is one of the most popular New Year's resolutions across the world. Dietary changes and fitness goals often accompany these resolutions, but many people have difficulty following through. Case in point: gym attendance and memberships spike each January but fall a few weeks later. This may sound familiar. Perhaps one year, your New Year's fitness resolution became just a New Year's workout, followed by days of procrastination. Let's face it. Starting a new fitness routine - and sticking with it - is challenging. If we're not regularly working out, then the mere thought of grabbing our workout gear and hitting the gym may fill us with dread. When we start to realize we're more out of shape than we thought we were, doubts about our routine can easily set in and hold us back. And if we don't know where to start, setting the wrong goals can lead us to taper off from our new routine faster than we'd like. We may never be able to completely abolish that nagging voice in our head that encourages us to forgo our fitness routine. But if we make the right New Year's fitness resolutions and approach our new fitness routine the right way, we have a much better chance of sticking with it for the long haul. How to make the right New Year's resolutions Too often, when we make fitness resolutions for New Year's, we come up with vague and overbroad statements like "lose weight" or "get in shape." Resolutions like these usually do not get us anywhere. Without specific goals, it's hard to remain motivated day by day. Further, we are almost unconsciously giving ourselves an out. We could lose a couple of pounds or see a bit of toned muscle and say we've fulfilled our New Year's resolution. But, if we're being honest with ourselves, our true goal is a lot more weight loss or to reach greater levels of physical fitness. Sometimes, we make incredibly ambitious resolutions with similarly detailed subgoals for the New Year. Approaching resolutions this way can also be detrimental to sticking with our routine for the long haul. If our goals are not aligned with our current levels of physical fitness, time constraints, and interests, it can become quite easy to suffer through a brutal session or miss one, become discouraged, then begin to falter. Also, if we are too rigid in our planning, our boredom can lead to discouragement. The right way to make a resolution is to approach it as a SMART goal. SMART stands for: Specific Measurable Attainable Relevant Time-Bound In other words, you want to establish resolutions that have specific and quantifiable goals you can achieve. A proper resolution would include a specific numerical weight loss or fitness training goal. Our New Year's fitness goals should be something we can realistically attain. We can't expect to go from couch potato to Olympic athlete overnight. So we should carefully evaluate our fitness and health before setting our goals. Our goals should also be relevant to us, which means we shouldn't set a goal of completing a triathlon just because our friend is a triathlete, but we hate swimming and running. We should be at least mildly interested in the athletic area(s) we plan to pursue to help keep us motivated day by day. Finally, our resolution should be time-bound, meaning it should have a start date and an end date. By establishing these goalposts, we can measure our progress, making adjustments as necessary to achieve our goals. Without them, we could easily lose our intensity, our focus, and our motivation. Even if our resolution is well-crafted, it's up to us to do the hard work of achieving it. Chances are you've struggled to complete a fitness goal in the past. And even if you're fairly self-motivated, there will be days where you wake up and want to toss your workout plans out the window. But if you follow these tips, you're much more likely to keep your fitness goals intact throughout the New Year. Plan ahead It's hard enough to get to the gym at the crack of dawn or after a long day's work. But when you're also scrambling to find clean sweats, your water bottle, fitness tracker, combination lock, and the rest of what you need, it's much, much harder. You may even lose enough time trying to find your gear that you no longer have the time to get to the gym. But even if you do, starting your workout with this stress can make it harder to complete. Make sure you lay out your fitness gear well before your workout so that the transition from bed or work to your local or home gym is as frictionless as possible. Give yourself time to recover After a moderate or high-intensity workout, our body needs time to recover. But in the early days of January, when we're still gung ho about our New Year's fitness goals, it's easy to overdo it by training too much or too hard. Be sure to give your body adequate rest in between training sessions. And as busy as we often are, it's just as easy to try to keep to our established routine even when our sleep is being interrupted by other personal or professional obligations. Get enough rest each night, and don't overdo it. Pay attention to your body for signs of fatigue and make adjustments to your routine as necessary to ensure you have proper recovery time. Get a personal trainer Heading to the gym can be especially daunting if you don't know what you're doing. While there's a wealth of information about different exercises online, it can be difficult to distinguish what combinations, volume, and intensity level you need to achieve your goals. And even self-taught gym enthusiasts can usually learn quite a bit from a professional. If you can afford one, hire a personal trainer. A qualified and experienced trainer can help you refine your fitness routine to ensure it achieves your goals. They can also help motivate and encourage you to stick to your plan. Find a workout buddy Even if you can't afford a personal trainer, working out with someone else can help you progress. When you work out with someone else, you tend to push yourself a little harder. You can also bounce fitness ideas off of them, learn from their practices, and encourage each other. Sometimes, when you feel like the last thing you want to do is go to the gym, knowing you won't be alone is just enough to get you going. Try to find a workout buddy to help you stick with your routine. This person can be a friend, colleague, or fellow gym member. Try to find someone in similar shape and with similar fitness goals for the best results. Make fitness fun Fitness doesn't have to be early AM drudgery, toiling away on an exercise bike or pounding out countless reps on a machine. In fact, if it is, our chances of sticking with our resolution past February are vanishingly small. But we can make our fitness routine fun by: Playing the music we enjoy while working out Watching a show we like while on a treadmill or exercise bike Rewarding ourselves for completing fitness subgoals Joining a fitness class and working out with others Setting up a healthy competition with our workout buddy Switching up our routine periodically Working out outdoors Participating in a fitness event, such as a 5k charity run Try these suggestions to liven up your fitness routine. Doing so can not only help you stave off boredom but may also make your regular fitness routine something you actually look forward to. The reward of persistence Regardless of your fitness goals, you can achieve them by crafting your New Year's fitness resolution using the SMART framework and sticking with your plan day by day, week by week. It's hard work. There's no sugarcoating it. But you can definitely do it. And if you plan ahead, get enough rest, hire a personal trainer (or find a workout buddy), and add a bit of fun to your routine, before you know it, you'll crush your New Year's fitness goals. Check out our website where we offer a wide range health and fitness products to help you along your journey.
