5 Ways to Stay On Track with Fitness and Nutrition in the New Year
Fitness resolutions can be difficult to commit to at any time of the year. While it’s brilliant to see more people creating a lifestyle of fitness in January, it takes hard work, consistency, preparation, and accountability to stay on track.
While it’s inevitable that a chunk of new gym goers or fitness resolutions will drift shortly after the first month of the New Year, there are steps you can take to reduce the mindset of “starting over” or “getting back to it.” By putting a solid system and process in place that aligns with your goals, you’ll help keep the drop off to a minimum and maximize your RESULTS over the year.
#1: CHANGE IT UP
Sometimes, we need to change up what we are doing for a short-time period to get back to what we love to do. When we return to our typical routine, we often come back feeling refreshed and rejuvenated. Consider changing up what you’re doing to help reduce burnout and/or plateaus.
If you typically do full-body strength training workouts, split up your muscle groups instead. Try a push-pull routine, or even dedicate a specific day to a specific muscle group. Or, if you run three to four times a week, consider if another type of cardiovascular exercise can be introduced as a cross-training tool one to two days a week to sustain the running motivation. Utilize all your exercise options to keep your training regimen both challenging and motivating.
#2 INCORPORATE RECOVERY TIME
Over-training may play a role in exercise burnout. If you think that is a possibility, it is essential to reduce the volume and/or intensity of what you are doing or take an active recovery approach while continuing to work through soreness and fatigue.
It’s important to make sure this new change incorporates an adequate amount of recovery and cross-training modalities in your program to reduce the possibility of future overtraining. The positive of noticing if this played a role early on is that slight changes can be made to a program before any potential injuries or ailments.
#3 MENTAL HEALTH AWARENESS
Mental health plays a vital role when beginning or prioritizing a healthy lifestyle of fitness. It is more familiar to associate mental burnout with job-related or personal stress. However, it is also possible to experience burnout from doing the same actions over a significant period without variety. If you combine that with being in the same environment while doing those repetitive activities, it can increase the likelihood of feeling burnout from the same old routine.
Trying something new, changing environments, or re-investing in a past hobby is the perfect solution to reduce exercise burnout and keep your mental health at the forefront. It channels our energy into focusing on something new, and we usually are highly motivated, ready to take action, or prepare to change.
#4 MEAL PREPARATION
Deciding what you’re going to eat on the fly is dangerous. That’s where planning ahead comes in. Preparing your weekly menus will make decisions at home and at the grocery store a lot easier. When you know what you’ll be eating, you’ll know exactly what to buy, what you can cook ahead of time, and how much time you need to set aside each day to feed yourself. You won’t have to think so hard about what you have room for every day and can much more easily allow yourself room for a few cheat meals every now and then without getting yourself off track.
#5 MUSIC MATTERS
In general, music has a real, significant effect on our mood and mindset. On top of that, we tend to begin to associate certain sounds and songs with the things we’re doing when we hear them. Whatever songs you pick for your workout playlist, the more you work out and play those songs during your workout, the more those songs will become synonymous with your workouts. So when you’re having a bad day, throw on your fitness tracks a little before you hit the gym so you can start getting into the right headspace for your regimen.
Overall, these tips are meant to reignite motivation, create awareness, and reduce mental and/or physical burnout from incorporating a fitness lifestyle in the New Year. It is important to note that these are not the only solutions, but a few to get you started.
As a whole, all of these strategies will help sustain motivation and self-care during these unprecedented times in the New Year!
