3 Reasons you Won’t Keep your New Year’s Fitness Resolutions (and 3 Ways to make sure you do)
Did you know that 50 percent of Americans set a New Year’s resolution? It’s great that so many millions of people are embracing the challenge of trying to better themselves in a tangible way. However, despite approaching the upcoming year with the best of intentions, only eight percent of New-Year’s-resolution makers truly see their resolutions through to fruition on an annual basis.
Because so many New Year’s resolutions involve fitness, I pay special attention to the factors that influence people’s decisions to maintain or deviate from their plans for physical self improvement.
The way I see it, there are three killers to every New Year’s fitness resolution. These may seem like minor factors, but each of these seemingly minor influences can permanently sidetrack you from accomplishing your goals if it is left unchecked, and allowed to take control of your life for even an instant. Stay alert, and be prepared with strategies to combat these three resolution-killing adversaries.
Lack of Motivation
In my opinion, motivation is the number one killer of all New Year’s fitness resolutions. Oftentimes, when we begin to follow through with our New Year’s fitness resolutions, we feel a strong initial motivation. This is a good thing, but real motivation comes from achieving results. When you see some initial success, and you begin to achieve your goals over and over again, that establishes a deep inner motivation for you to continue the actions that are causing you to achieve the results you have been craving. In this way, success definitely breeds even more success.
Setting Unrealistic Goals
The second major reason people get derailed from following through on their New Year’s fitness resolutions is because they set unrealistic goals. Saying that I want to lose 100 pounds is an admirable goal, but if I establish no realistic timeline for myself within which I intend to accomplish that goal, three weeks will pass, and I certainly will not have lost 100 pounds. At that point, it’s very easy to get discouraged, forget about my goal, and quit doing anything to reach it. As we mentioned earlier, success breeds success. Make sure you set small, achievable goals that you can build upon rather than setting an unrealistic goal that is going to leave you feeling hopeless and unfulfilled.
Procrastination
To me, procrastination is highest on the scale of issues that cause people to get sidetracked from achieving their New Year’s fitness resolutions. If you’ve set a goal, you need to act now, or you’ll move into the perilous realm of procrastination. Procrastination is a killer for any goal, because procrastination allows you to feel good about the dream of accomplishing something that you’re never going to accomplish.
If you tell yourself you’re going to get into tremendous shape tomorrow, then you’ll feel good about yourself. And then when tomorrow comes, you tell yourself again that you’re going to lose a lot of weight and get into tremendous shape… tomorrow. Once again, you feel good about yourself, and you get excited, but once you start to procrastinate, accomplishing your goal never happens. This is why you have to act right now.
In order to help you to avoid these three major culprits that have caused many New Year’s resolutions to go unfulfilled, I’m going to give you three strategies to achieve a successful, happy, healthy New Year’s fitness resolution that actually comes to pass.
These three strategies are very powerful.
Strategic Nutrition
The first strategy is to focus on nutrition. Nutrition is so utterly important because it’s what nurtures and nourishes our bodies so that we can perform. Simply put, never eat a carbohydrate alone, and always make sure you eat your proteins and your essential fatty acids along with your carbohydrates.
What this accomplishes is it takes the carbohydrates that you just ate and it lowers them on the glycemic scale, which makes it nearly impossible to convert those carbohydrate calories into fat. This way, you could actually eat three times the calories while still maintaining your weight, and you can possibly get even leaner.
Cardiovascular Exercise
The second strategy involves doing regular cardiovascular exercise. We call it “aerobics” because it’s “with air.” Literally, it’s “air-robics.” So, when you move oxygen through your system, it automatically burns body fat. In fact, doing this will send your body a signal causing it to burn body fat for up to 24 continuous hours. In this way, cardiovascular exercise permits you to burn fat constantly, and allows you to fight body fat on the front end through implementing proper nutrition practices, and on the back end by directly burning body fat.
Resistance Training
The third strategy, which you might have already guessed, is resistance training. This form of training shapes and builds your muscles, and the more muscle you have, the more body fat you can potentially burn. As human beings, we’re naturally motivated by results that we can see in the mirror. This means that if we have a goal of losing body fat, and the results of our resistance training allow us to burn more body fat than we otherwise would if we weren’t doing any resistance training, we’re going to be further motivated by our results and more likely maintain our ongoing fat-burning strategies.
Keep these strategies in mind; they will go a long way toward helping you maintain your New Year’s fitness resolutions. For more great fitness tips, feel free to check out the rest of the blog at RonWilliamsFitness.com, and also the Ron Williams channel on YouTube!
