With the first flush of New Year enthusiasm now burned out, bank accounts restored post-festive period, and daylight hours increasing, the gym floors are emptying out again. But you’ve done the hard part with getting started. So how can you maintain a fitness routine year-round and avoid that classic peak and trough cycle? Horsham-based personal trainer, Becky, shares her top tips…
Maintain, rather than increase
If you’ve made it this far, with the chaos of a busy gym floor, fighting for class bookings, and surrendering to the early morning alarms, the temptation might be to crank the dial and amp things up. Especially if you can now see the ticking clock of the countdown to a holiday and spend a lot of time on social media looking at 1% bodies.
But if you’re not truly feeling the urge to do more, and know you’d struggle to fit more in, hold off for now. It’s not a race. Allow the habits you’ve already built to fully embed, rather than upping the stakes further and biting off more than you can chew. Consistency beats intensity almost every time, so give yourself a chance to really get into the flow before you add more to your to-do list.
Daylight is coming
If you’re not quite satisfied with my first point, maximise the natural gift we’re being given. Daylight hours are steadily increasing, and for some people, this provides an ideal opportunity to access another piece of activity.
Even if the walk you add is an extra 10 or 15 minutes on three days out of seven, that’s up to 45 minutes that you weren’t previously doing. It can be things like choosing a different car park when you run errands, to encourage yourself to walk more, getting off a bus a couple of stops earlier, or taking a blast around the block at lunchtime. As long as you’ve got comfortable shoes on, this is your window to benefit from some fresh air and extra activity. Just make sure you also still have a waterproof coat handy!
Plan ahead for other targets
We’ve completed chapter one of 2024, and there are 11 remaining. As we slowly start to emerge from winter mode, it’s a good time to think about the rest of the year ahead, and consider whether there are new things we’d like to try.
It could be that you want to do something high intensity, like entering a challenge. If the competitive spirit isn’t your jam, it might be that you’re looking to stretch yourself in terms of the range of activities you attempt this year – is it that there’s a specific class or style of exercise that you’re curious about? Or maybe you want to check out something completely different whilst you’re on a trip – a sport that’s only possible in different conditions, or a cool activity that’s offered in a certain location.
Looking at those now enables you to get them booked in your diary, and figure out what else you might have to do to get there, whether it’s a little bit of conditioning, or even financial preparation. Speaking of which…
Budget for new kit
Nothing lasts forever, and if you’re on a fitness campaign, your body is likely to change. Sports bras shouldn’t have a birthday, and shoes are another piece of kit which regularly need updating, as is swimwear (if, unlike me, you do more than just sit in it admiring the view).
You also tend to find that some activities involve procuring more kit as you take them more seriously – outdoor swimming or SUP are good examples of this, as are equestrian sports. Even things like pole fitness – it may well be that you end up with a pole in your home, but even more likely is that you’ll want to treat yourself to a fun outfit for a show or photoshoot.
When you plan purchases ahead, it takes away some of the stress, and better enables you to seek out a deal – sales on items such as sports bras are predictably held in January and September, so keep this in mind to help you watch the pennies. If you’ve got items that are still usable but that don’t fit you or your purpose anymore, make use of resale sites or donate them to fitness charities in order to maximise the use of them.
Are you actually enjoying it though?
Finally, it’s also a good idea to have an honest conversation with yourself. I’ll let you into a secret – back in 2017, I was a month into my fitness plans at this point. And I wasn’t loving it. I found running hard, and not fun. I was signed up to a course, so decided to stick it out, hoping that the enjoyment would come.
It didn’t.
But I’d then got past the initial physical difficulty, and chose to keep going as I wasn’t sure what else to do. I thought that getting stronger might help me to improve, and therefore enjoy it more. What actually happened was that I discovered I liked lifting weights, and eventually abandoned running for good.
What can you learn from this? Exercise is a lifetime commitment, the activity you choose isn’t.
You can change your focus. This isn’t childhood, when your parents have paid for a term’s worth of classes in advance. If you aren’t enjoying it even once in a while, look elsewhere, it’s absolutely ok.
And if you want to try one-to-one personal training with a female coach who gets it… let me know!