Ready to achieve your #healthgoals?
According to research conducted by Strava (the running and biking tracking app), most people abandon their New Year’s Resolutions around the third week of January. The pattern is so predictable, they’ve even coined January 19th as Quitter’s Day!
What’s interesting is that the problem is not the resolutions themselves, but rather, the routines required to achieve them. Creating new health habits starts to feel like a chore and we give up on the concept altogether. Conversely, if we stick to our daily routines, our progress compounds over time and leads us to achieve (or surpass) our goals.
As James Clear writes in his bestselling book Atomic Habits, “If you can get 1% better each day for a year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.”
That sounds a whole lot better than being part of the Quitter’s Day statistic, right? Of course.
Now all you need is some direction to actually define and create these habits. There are several approaches to behaviour change, especially in the health and fitness world, so we’ve mapped out four simple and effective ways for you to use that we use ourselves!
1. Find an accountability partner
Pick a friend or family member who’s also interested in creating some new habits and agree on a daily or weekly time to touch base. Set aside just a few minutes to connect, tell each other when and how you’ll complete your task that day and challenge one another if attempted bailing occurs (we’re all guilty of this now and then!)
By simply sharing with someone else, you’ll find more ways to be successful knowing that someone else is counting on you.
Need help finding an accountability partner? Join a Team Training or Studio Fitness class and get to know like-minded members that have similar goals! Get Your First Class FREE.
2. Schedule, schedule, schedule
They say that if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Whether you use a digital calendar, paper agenda or any other scheduling tool, pencil in your daily habits that will help you achieve your health and fitness goals. Things to schedule might include:
- Researching recipes / meal planning
- Grocery shopping
- Cooking / meal prepping
- Exercising (of course!) – Make Sure You Keep Up with GROUP classes and schedules to attend your favorite classes with your favorite instructors –
- Drinking water
- Meditating
Be sure to give yourself sufficient time to complete each task. Like anything, you’ll become quicker over time.
3. Routinely reward progress
While we are working diligently to build new habits to achieve our goals, trust that you will likely still be tempted to slip up. One way to help curb this temptation is to incentivize yourself with attractive rewards for mini milestones. For example, if your resolution was to run a marathon in 2021, your new habits would be running X times per week. You might reward yourself with new FP Gear, a massage or something else rewarding every week that you hit your goal. On the other hand, if you don’t achieve your goal, you will not get the reward.
Pro tip: use your accountability partner for this so they have some control of purchasing your reward!
4. Make it FUN
If we’re trying to combat the feeling that fitness is a chore, we’ve got to make our habits as appealing as possible. Making our habits fun is a great way to do that. For starters, choose workouts that you genuinely enjoy, find accountability partners that make you laugh, create playlists that make you want to move and find recipes that literally make you drool!
Sure, these are all simple tips, but they’re guaranteed to be game changers if you give them enough effort. Whether you start with one of these tips or all four, the key lesson here is: your goals are totally achievable if you’re willing to commit to changing your habits.
Remember, you don’t have to do all alone, we’re here for you and we’ve got plenty going on at FITNESS PROJECT like Studio Fitness and Group Classes to help you stay on track and give you a boost when you need it.
Ready to build better habits that will actually get you to your goals and beyond? Start right now. We’re cheering for you.
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