How are your New Years fitness resolutions? If you are like most, you are off to a rocky start and are getting de-motivated. Here’s how to turn it around! Rather than throwing up your hands, admitting defeat, and waiting till next year to try another fitness resolution, lets try a better approach.
Don’t feel bad if you are not on track with your fitness resolutions, you are in good company – namely, me. I am very experienced at making, and achieving, fitness resolutions and even I mis-step. How you handle the “failure” determines your long term success. If you view it as all or nothing, black and white, failure or success, then you are in trouble. If you view it as a valuable learning experience then you will be very successful long term.
Now is a critical time for you to take a step back and see how you are doing, its been a month since you made your resolutions. Are you on track? Why or why not? Rather than throw up your hands, recalibrate. If your goals were too ambitious considering your other life priorities and commitments, lower your goals – you are allowed to do that because they are YOUR goals.
Lets take my overly ambitious goals for 2013:
- Better my 200 mile race time by one hour in 2013
- Play beach volleyball once a week, March thru October of 2013
- Better my Half Ironman time by 7 minutes in 2013
- Do masters swimming once per week in 2013
- Finish building my homebuilt aircraft!
I am only a month into the year and its clear that these goals are not realistic, the trouble is the last one – finishing building my airplane that I started in 2001. Finishing the airplane is my #1 goal for the year and its going to take a LOT more time than I anticipated so that means I have to prune down my other goals. I can’t manufacture time, there are only 24hrs in a day and the sooner I adapt my goals to that the happier I will be. I am really excited about being more active in beach volleyball so I want to keep that goal, that only leaves my race related goals. Training for triathlons and double centuries is very time intensive and I just dont have time to compete this year. Goals 1, 3, and 4 above are all race related goals that I need to give up to make time to succeed in goals 2 and 5. So, here are my new “reality-checked” goals for 2013:
- Keep in good cardio shape by doing 30-60min cardio every day
- Maintain muscle mass and strength with four hours of weight workouts a week
- Play beach volleyball once a week, March thru October of 2013
- Finish building my homebuilt aircraft!
Am I a failure for failing my goals so early in the year? Certainly not! I was just overly ambitious. Learn, adapt, and move on! You will be surprised how much more motivated you feel when you have fine-tuned your goals to be achievable!