Creating A Gym Routine That Sticks
Just like that the first month of 2022 has flown by and we hope you’ve had a fun, relaxing and incredible start to your New Year.
No doubt, we all come into the New Year with better intentions and an excitement of what possibilities we could actually build for ourselves this year.
However as we return to our normal work routine, and the New Years excitement wears off, this is where reserving energy and effort to acting on our goals starts to become a real challenge.
When an action is not yet a habit, it is harder to execute because it requires a more conscious effort. If we’ve made a start on our Resolutions so far this year, they’re not yet a habit by the time we reach February and so we need to put in place strategies to help us move forward and cement these habits for long term success.
We all know that success is the result of consistent and near daily action that achieves a certain outcome.
So how can we create an environment that facilitates change and allows us to actually bring these intentions into fruition?
Keep reading for our tips on developing a routine that will set you up for success in 2022.
Identify the goal and outcome
It can be confronting and overwhelming sitting with your thoughts and trying to gain clarity on what outcomes truly align and spark something within you. For some, it highlights that we may not actually know what we want and that’s perfectly okay and normal to experience. Often we know the things that we think we ‘should’ want, and often identifying the difference and questioning your ‘why’ behind it can be a great way to get clear on which direction you’d like to move. If your ‘why’ behind a certain outcome is to please others, to fit in with a certain crowd, to follow the exact footsteps of another, this may be a sign that your goal may not be authentically yours.
When we have a certain outcome to work towards, this helps guide our decision making to align with that outcome. It is good to set goals that you feel are realistic and achievable, but goals are supposed to scare you a little bit. If you’re not forced out of comfort zone, there’ll be no opportunity to adapt and grow.
2. Determine your systems.
Now that we’re clear on our goal, simply affirming it won’t bring it into fruition. The achievement of it lies in our systems. When we look at a goal in its entirety, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the process you have to go through to get there. All we need to do here is break down that process into steps and tasks that we focus on one day at a time. These tasks could be:
Meal planning
Food shopping
Training session
Daily step target
Water intake target
Setting a regular bed time
And then we need to look for the opportunities to insert these tasks into our life.
3. Flesh out your routine around your non-negotiables.
When looking to add more positive habits to your lifestyle, it’s important to get clear on what it is you truly value to avoid any conflict of interest. Unfortunately, the amount of time we have in a day remains the same, and sometimes sacrifice is required to make room for things that are going to serve us better. That’s why if you establish what truly matters most to you, whether it be:
Your job and career
Time with your family
Being social and exploring
Having meals out
We want to make sure that we still include these things in our life so our routine feels sustainable and, most importantly, enjoyable! Sustainability and enjoyment leads to consistency, and consistency produces a result. From here we first want to schedule in our non-negotiables, such as your work hours, your appointments, your family time, your social outings. And then we want to fill in the gaps and schedule time to execute your tasks. This involves finding the most suitable time in terms of your lifestyle, whether you’d prefer to train in the mornings, or maybe the evenings are a more sustainable option for you.
4. Create a training plan/program.
Now that we’ve identified how training can fit into our routine, it’s important that we go in with a plan to avoid wasting time and so we are able to apply progressive overload. Progressive overload is the act of gradually improving performance on a particular lift over a period of time, whether it be strength, execution, or volume. Having a training program means we can manage our progressive overload so we walk in with direction and focus, and means we spend less time planning and having to think about our gym sessions every time. Depending on the training goal, all programs and structure will look incredibly different and need to be structured in a specific way to achieve a certain outcome. Having a Coach is incredibly beneficial to create an effective training approach tailored to you, taking the guess work out of your training, and ultimately saving you time and stress from not seeing the outcome you want.
5. Build consistency off the smaller actions.
We don’t have to start off by doing everything perfectly. Placing this kind of pressure on ourselves will most likely have us feeling overwhelmed and like a failure if we miss a few things. And this can quickly derail any mindset, causing us to give up completely because it’s ‘too hard.’ We’re going to use the analogy of acclimatisation here, because to thrive in a different environment, we first need to give ourselves time to condition. If we were to go from a cold climate, and immediately step out into a dessert, our bodies will really struggle. What we want to do is gradually increase exposure so we adjust to our new conditions and move through them with greater ease, because what’s being added is a manageable stimulus. We want to treat building our routine just like this, every act or task that we perform will be heating up the temperature by 1 degree each time. Once we feel we have nailed one habit and have a good handle on it, that’s when we can look at implementing or improving upon another area. Bit by bit, you will begin to transform your whole life.
6. Most importantly - have fun with it.
Any desire to change is ultimately to make our situation better and add value to our lives. Building better habits should enhance our quality of life, not take over our lives. So if you notice any obsessive thoughts occur around your new habits, it may be better to let that particular habit go if it’s not serving you in a positive way.
May this be your year of breaking belief patterns, going after what you want and reinventing yourself because it’s never too late to start. Time is our most precious commodity because we can never buy more or take it back. Start dedicating your time to what makes you feel happy, empowered and vibrant.