Owning Your Fitness New Year’s Resolutions

Every January, millions of people around the world look back and evaluate the past year, committing themselves to make positive changes in their lives. Unfortunately, change doesn’t come easily, and jumping right in without any structure is a surefire way to struggle.

Let’s take a quick look at one of the most popular resolutions — getting into better shape. Usually, this means losing weight or gaining muscle in order to improve one’s health, appearance, or confidence. It generally manifests in a spike in gym memberships and sales of workout gear in late December, only to fizzle away by the end of February.

A quick look at Google Trends shows a dramatic and marked spike in fitness related searches near the end of each year, followed by a return to baseline within 2 months.

The commitment to improve oneself is commendable, but in reality it is the result that ultimately matters. So how can you make sure that you stick with your resolution and reach your goals? Let’s look at some tools applied directly to the most common case — fitness-related resolutions.

Using S.M.A.R.T. Goals as a Framework

S.M.A.R.T. is a popular framework often taught by management consultants and in training seminars to help individuals get a better handle on goal-setting. It’s a mnemonic that stands for Specific, Meaningful, Actions-oriented, Realistic, and Time-bound. It is intended to help you remember the key principles of good goals, and can easily be adopted for New Year’s resolutions.

Specific
What exactly do you want to achieve with this resolution? While this may sound like a trivial question, the answers are generally not precise enough to help create the necessary structure and discipline. For example, many people often say they want to “lose weight”, but in most cases they actually mean “lose fat” so that they can look better in a swimsuit or fit into a smaller clothing size. Similarly, instead of committing to gain muscle, you might want to commit to either gaining strength or muscle size, both of which may require different types of training to achieve.

Meaningful
Why is this goal so important to you? Do you want to gain muscle so that you can perform better at sports? Do you want to lose weight because you no longer fit into your favorite clothes? Often times, understanding the underlying reason for your resolution will help ensure that your goal is correct, and that your milestones will lead you to success.

Actions Oriented
What specific actions will you take in order to achieve your goals? If you are trying to lose fat, you may commit to a low-carb lifestyle and high-intensity interval training multiple times a week. If you’re looking to gain strength, you may commit to tracking your nutrition for a slight caloric surplus, accompanied by low-volume, high-intensity weight training multiple times a week. Understanding these actions will help you in tracking your progress (more on this later).

Realistic
Is this goal actually achievable for you? Many people set unrealistic goals, only to be disappointed when they don’t meet them. This causes detrimental negative feedback that discourages them from taking on more goals.

“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”

For most people, this quote serves as a security blanket, assuring them that even if they don’t meet their goals, they still haven’t failed. While I agree that not achieving what you set out to doesn’t necessarily equate to failure, the premise of shooting for the moon so you land among the stars is inherently dangerous. By following this, you are accepting defeat before you even begin. You are essentially telling yourself you can’t achieve what you had initially set out to. If your goal was the stars in the first place, then why not aim for that up front rather than hoping for the best?

Time-bound
What milestones or check-ins will you put into place to ensure you are on track to owning your resolution? Determining the rate of progress is the real key to finding out what you can achieve in a given time frame.

For example, I have said in the past that I wanted to lose 10 lbs in a month. The reality is that I might be able to lose all of that weight in a week, but if I was to do it in a healthy sustainable way, my goal should be closer to 2 months. How could I possibly know how to set this goal, if I have several options that technically could be possible?

It all boils down to rates. If I know that my plan of attack is likely a low-carbohydrate diet accompanied by high-intensity interval training, then there would be 3–5 lbs of initial water weight lost, followed by about one pound of fat loss a week. If I did some simple math, it would mean that I could achieve a healthy 10 lb weight loss in 8 weeks, or two months. If you can understand the rate, you can set appropriate milestones to ensure you’re on track.

For some, the rate itself can seem too slow. For example, one pound of fat loss a week will result in 4–5 lbs a month, which may not seem like a lot. However, in a year it equates to over 50lbs of pure fat loss, which is a massive change! Moreover, doing it at a safe and sustainable rate will minimize the risk of plateauing or rebounding and regaining the weight.

Whenever the rate seems too slow for me, I think back on just how fast the past three months have gone by, and it makes me feel more comfortable that the weight will come off faster than I realize.

A Step by Step Guide

The S.M.A.R.T. framework can help put you in the right mindset, and I found that the following steps have helped me be successful with my New Year’s resolutions in the past.

Step 1: Create a plan

Creating a plan is a crucial first step to making progress on your fitness-related New Year’s resolution. At Trainer, we firmly believe that both proper nutrition and regular exercise are required in order to reach your goals. For diet, there are many online tools that help with creating a sustainable plan so that you know how many total calories and macronutrients you should aim for on a daily or weekly basis. For exercise, you can start with some of our pre-built workouts and modify them to fit your needs. Coming up with a solid plan that you can be consistent with is key. Just remember to make sure it’s realistic for you and something you can adhere to.

Step 2: Make it public

Announce your resolution on social media and to all of your friends and family. By putting your resolution out there, you automatically add more downside to the prospect of not reaching your goal, which will make you psychologically more motivated to stick to your plan.

Step 3: Make it routine

One of the easiest ways to make sure you continue making progress is to make the necessary actions part of your daily or weekly routine. For example, commit to working out at the same time every day so that you no longer have to worry about scheduling, which often can cause you to miss workouts due to unforeseen changes in your schedule. By committing to make it an immovable part of your day, you will make it much easier to stick to.

Step 4: Annoying reminders

Even after making it routine, sometimes it’s tough to get out of bed and go to the gym, or to come home after a long day of work and cook something healthy. That’s why it’s useful to set up reminders to prompt you to do the things you’ve committed to. Create appointments in your calendar, or set recurring alarms to serve as a cue to stick to your schedule. These are often invaluable tools as you’re getting started.

Step 5: Track your progress

At Trainer, we believe that monitoring your progress is key to your success. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. It’s also extremely motivational to look back at how far you’ve come in a short period of time. We’ve built tools to help you view charts of your improvement over time.

If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

Be sure to track what you’re actually trying to affect, and be wary of what’s referred to as “vanity metrics”. For example, if your goal was to gain muscle, you might be happy if the weight on the scale goes up. However, if that’s not accompanied by strength increases, or if most of that weight is in the form of fat, you haven’t actually taken a step closer to your goals. Likewise, if you want to get leaner, or you want a smaller waist, you shouldn’t be relying solely on weight loss. Instead, you should track body fat and lean body mass by utilizing some cheap and relatively effective body fat scales or calipers from Amazon.

Step 6: Evaluate and Course-Correct

Sometimes, things don’t go according to plan. Maybe a birthday or a vacation slips in and throws you off track. That’s okay, it happens and it shouldn’t discourage you! Every week or two, evaluate the progress you’ve made in that time period and see if you’re actually achieving the rate you set out to achieve. If so, awesome! If not, can you get back on track, or do you need to revise your milestones? It’s okay if things change, just be careful not to do this too often as it can easily become a slippery slope.