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New Year Fitness and Wellbeing

By Roger Wanner

If you are like most people, you approach each New Year with wonderful intentions to improve your Fitness and Wellbeing and do more in the coming year. Then the New Year comes, and goes, and somehow those good intentions to improve Fitness and Wellbeing didn’t translate into new accomplishments. Of course, when that pattern repeats itself year after year, we eventually give up on the good intentions altogether and resign ourselves to mediocrity. DON’T GIVE UP. There is wisdom and hope in the old adage, “If you want something you have never had, you must do something you have never done.”

I have some suggestions for you regarding your New Year Fitness and Wellbeing resolutions to get in better shape. After all, is there anything more important to you than your health? Virtually every day the first section of the newspaper has an article about the serious problems from obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, stress and a host of other preventable diseases if we were only in better shape. So here are four simple things you can DO to fulfill your New Year resolutions to get in better shape:

  1. Set exercise appointments with yourself. Use your day-timer to set appointments for exercise – and then stick to them. You wouldn’t miss a business meeting or client appointment, would you? So don’t miss your exercise appointment with yourself. Nothing is more important than your health. Nothing. Everything else will crumble around you if your health goes south. So make your exercise appointments a priority.

  2. Set realistically attainable goals. You must have tangible, quantifiable, short-term and long-term goals for your fitness program so you can gauge your progress. It’s crucial to have a “baseline” before you begin, so you can measure success. Having goals, particularly short-term goals, allows you to track your progress and keep you motivated when times are tough and you don’t feel like exercising. Keeping a journal of your cardio and resistance training workouts, as well as tracking what you eat, is truly a fitness success secret. Just remember that your goals should be realistic and attainable.

  3. Remember the benefits of exercise. Remember the feeling of euphoria you experienced after a particularly good work-out? You experienced that feeling because the most powerful “feel good”drug in the world – endorphins – were coursing through your veins. If there is a panacea, it’s exercise. Nothing feels better than the post-work-out high you experience after exercising. Revel in that feeling. Let it wash over you and truly experience it. Etch that feeling in your brain. It will fuel your motivation on those inevitable days when you just don’t feel like exercising. Being physically fit affects every single aspect of your life: you sleep better, eat better, love better, overcome stress better, work better, communicate better and live better!

  4. Finally, and most importantly, use ACCOUNTABILITY to help you. That’s right, accountability is the number one, most important thing you can do to help you keep your resolution to get in shape. But not accountability to yourself. It’s too easy to rationalize this away. Not accountability to a spouse, partner or friend either. They’ll stop nagging you because they don’t want to damage the relationship. The secret is accountability to a coach, mentor and guide…someone who is committed to your commitment and impervious to your excuses. They can also help you with numbers 1, 2 and 3 above.

About the Author:

Roger is a ACE Certified Personal Trainer and owner of the Fitness Together in Lake Grove NY.