When you are embarking on a new fitness journey, more than half of the battle is simply keeping it up. Anyone can commit to a short-term exercise plan, but a quick fix isn’t really a fix at all. Diets alone don’t work for everyone, but a change in lifestyle and routine does.
Straight from our in-house professional fitness team, we’re offering you some helpful advice on how to maintain momentum – and ultimately, succeed, with your new fitness regime.
Don’t Set a Definitive Goal
That subheading is slightly misleading because it is always good to set yourself a goal, but – and this is key - do not set a goal that is unrealistic or one that means that, as soon as you reach a target weight, you will down tools. Neither are productive, and, in the long run, will only see you revert back to square one - or worse.
It is no secret that many people who take their first few steps into a new fitness regime do so wanting to lose weight. The question is this - do you want to lose weight to feel better about yourself and to improve your general all-round health? Or do you want to lose weight purely to see a lower number on the bathroom scales in the morning?
The answer to that question should absolutely be to feel better and healthier because that is the most important aspect of fitness. If you set out purely to lose X amount of pounds, the chances are that as soon as you have reached your goal you will stop. After all, you will have come to the end of your fitness journey, right?
Wrong!
Fitness is constant and no matter how good you feel having kept to an eight-week, 12-week, 16-week or however-many-week program, your fitness levels will drop and deplete once more when you stop. Therefore, the first, and most important, step to maintaining your fitness regime to understand why exactly you decided to start in the first place and understanding the wider benefits of looking after your body, rather than just a decreasing waistline.
Track Your Progress
Here at Bodyjunkies, we recommend tracking your week-by-week progress as not only does it make for good reading further down the line, but it helps you become your own inspiration and motivation, too. Looking back at your progress helps to reaffirm that what you are doing is working if you ever feel as though you have hit a wall in your fitness journey – and trust us when we say that it happens to us all.
For example, if you happen to have a week where you don’t drop any weight and are suffering from a lack of motivation, you can refer to your progress to see how far you have already come in your journey. The personal trainers here at Bodyjunkies work closely with our clients and keep tabs on their progress, formulating tailored training plans to get the most out of their sessions and this is a big help when it comes to staying on track.
Of course, it isn’t just weight loss that determines whether your regime is working for you or not, as your fitness levels are also an important factor to consider. You can lose weight very quickly by crash dieting, but if your body is not receiving the nutrition it needs then this can be to the detriment of your overall fitness levels.
Where to start? We would recommend tracking your fitness through variables such as; time to cover a set distance, heart rate during exercise and resting heart rate, the number of reps per set and more. There are many ways to assess fitness, which can ultimately come down to what exactly your goal is (such as weight loss, muscle gain or just to improve your general all-round base fitness). By tracking these variables, you can easily assess when you feel you are ready to move to the next stage- whether that’s setting new targets or goals with reps or the time it takes to run 5k. This is the start of how you stay in control of your progress.
Exercising and Socialising
We have all woken up early in the morning with the intention of hitting the gym before work, only to lie their tucked up in bed (that feels infinitely comfier now than it did when you first got into bed the night before) racking our brains for an excuse as to why you definitely can’t workout.
What if it wasn’t just you on this journey though? What if, as you were flicking through your Rolodex of excuses you had a phone call or text message asking where are you?
A fitness friend, gym buddy or whatever else you want to name the person you work out with, can do wonders for keeping you motivated. In fact, that’s exactly why Bodyjunkies’ group personal training sessions prove so popular because our members can sign up to the same program together, while still benefiting from tailored fitness programs.
Exercise is best when it’s fun, and it’s much better getting hot and sweaty with someone else than by yourself. Even if you don’t necessarily attend the exact same sessions, just having someone to go with at the same time can make all the difference in the long run and you will be less likely to fall off the wagon with a friend keeping you firmly on it.
For more information on how you can join Bodyjunkies and benefit from our range of fitness classes led by our team of amazing trainers, please get in touch with us today.
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