Happy New Year!
Each year, when Visions first opens its doors, the buzz is electric. Even outside on the streets of Hawthorn, the feeling is always light and optimistic, and it’s infectious. The few coffee shops that are open are bustling, the running track along the Yarra is packed and St James Park is energised with kids and adults alike.
Back at Visions, whilst a few gym-goers are braving rusty hangovers from NYE, each person walks into the gym with a revitalised energy to begin the year the right way. Many of us are eager to set resolutions that prioritise our health and well-being, and we encourage that. Setting goals is in important part of any fitness routine, let alone life more generally.
However, making New Year's resolutions stick can be a challenge. To help you embark on a successful fitness journey, here are five tips to help ensure your fitness resolutions become a lasting part of your lifestyle.
Set Realistic and Achievable Goals:
It’s a bit of an age-old mantra, but there’s a reason it stands the test of time. One of the most common pitfalls in New Year's resolutions is setting overly ambitious goals. While aiming high is admirable and feels good at the time, setting realistic and achievable milestones is key to long-term success. Instead of vowing to roll into Visions every single day, start with something more manageable - maybe such as three-four times a week. Maybe shoot for a half marathon before committing to the big 42.2km.
These lowered sites may not feel as courageous at the stroke of midnight when you’re watching the fireworks from your chosen Hawthorn location (we recommend Xavier) and you first make the commitment. Yet the reality is that you're more likely to stay committed and build a more stable foundation for a fitness routine when you tick-off achievable short-term goals. Break down your larger goals into smaller, actionable steps, allowing you to celebrate achievements along the way and stay motivated.
Goal setting is something the Visions team can help you with, through a free one hour program, or even with some personal training.
Diversify Your Routine - Find What You Love:
Keep your fitness journey exciting by incorporating a variety of activities into your routine. Mix up what your gym workout contains - try new movements, mix up your intensity, even try new forms of exercise. Grab a friend and try some of Visions’ group training offerings - whether its HIIT, boxing or strength classes. There’s also the option of working alongside a personal trainer, or even tackle some performance optimisation with our resident physiotherapist, Mark Meroli, and his array of impressive tech gear.
Or maybe you need to balance your gym sessions with some outdoor activity, too. We’re not about to claim Visions is your only option for activity. Cycle around the Yarra? Once-a-week swim at the Rec Centre? Run down along the Yarra Trail? Or a game of Tennis at Grace Park? We can help you train for all these new activities inside the gym, to maximise what your get from them outside the gym - book a program here.
Image courtesy Yarra Council
Diversifying your workouts not only helps stimulate the noggin’ and keeps satisfaction high, but it also ensures a well-rounded approach to your health and fitness and improves the likelihood you’ll keep at it.
Be Gentle on Yourself:
Building healthy habits takes time, so be patient with yourself especially when you’re starting out or coming back from an extended break. In fact, don’t be hard on yourself from taking a break at all. We fall out of routine - it happens. But sometimes being harder on yourself, albeit a form of motivation, can result in feelings of guilt. Whilst some may argue there’s a place for guilt, be careful not to let a negative emotion correspond to a negative association with fitness. Expect some breaks along the way. That’s part of it.
Having watched people start and re-start routines for most of his life at Visions, Pat, the owner of Visions, has a simple approach when he’s returning to the gym after a break. His first 7 workouts are whole body routines that last 25 minutes, maximum. Why? First, the time restriction prevents the temptation to ‘do a bit more’, which so often results in overwhelming your body and being unable to move the next day. Secondly, its far easier to reintegrate short bursts into your routine, especially if exercise hasn’t found its way into your timetable recently.
The specifics of this approach may not work for everyone, but the idea rings true - be gentle from the get-go - for the sake of your body, but also for the sake of your enthusiasm.
Prioritise Consistency Over Intensity:
Consistency is the secret sauce to achieving lasting results. Instead of pushing yourself to the limit in sporadic bursts, focus on maintaining a consistent and sustainable routine. It’s similar to Pat’s approach, above, but extended over the course of your goal-chasing fitness journey. Be patient, build slowly. Find a rhythm that fits your lifestyle, build the foundations and gradually increase intensity as your fitness level improves. What’s that old adage? Rome wasn’t built in a day?
Finally - Focus on the Right Motivators
Goals are great - don’t get us wrong. They are important motivators and drive us forward and often upward. But the nature of most fitness goals is to be number-based, which means the satisfaction of ‘achieving’ is only reached when you hit certain markers down the track. So what happens until then? It’s important to balance these ‘future’ positive feedback loops with more gradual ones along the way. One such way is to break goals down into small increments, as mentioned above, but we think there’s one approach that is even more important…
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it a thousand more times - a recipe for success is focusing on how exercise makes you feel. When you finish your workout and reflect on how you feel, the answer is inevitably ‘great’. That’s an INSTANT feedback loop that improves your mood and energy, and ultimately entice you to recreate that again. From your first workout to your 61st, you’ll feel good walking down the stairs after a workout at Visions. You start to develop an intrinsic motivation – something based on internal positive feelings instead of satisfying external measures. And when you miss a few sessions, or even a few months, instead of feeling guilt, as so many of us experience (even thought we shouldn’t), you might just find yourself craving ‘feeling good’ again. Even if a bit of guilt persists, having the draw of a positive feeling is a much more appealing motivator for getting you back on track. So next time you finish any activity - reflect on how good it felt. You just might start to revolutionise your overall feelings around fitness. For more, read our blog from a few months back, here.
There’s no single answer, but some of these tips might just help you design the right approach to suit you and your goals - whether they are for the next month or the next year!
We’d love to help you with your fitness goals wherever we can. Come in and have a chat with us at reception, and if you’d like to book in a program to more thoroughly sit down with us, book one, here.
Happy 2024!