This is it – the New Year is here, sweeping around the world from Australia to the United States, the Earth has completed the turn around the clock and now we are all basking in the arrival of a brand new year. But this is your year. This is the year that you’re going to sign up at the gym. You’re going to go to be at the gym, Monday through Friday, for 45 minutes every day. You’re going to achieve your goals and you’re going to lose that extra weight and be in the best shape of your life.
Determination
You need determination when you begin any new project whether it’s on your job, a fixer upper around the house or getting into shape. But determination must be tempered by forward thinking. Your determination will get you going to the gym daily, but it won’t keep you going when you fall into the first trap of any workout program: boredom.
Though hardly the only trap waiting to suck you out of your workout program and back to relaxing on the sofa, but boredom is one of the most difficult traps to overcome because it affects different people in different ways.
Boredom can be caused by:
- Not seeing results you want quickly
- A repetitive routine that varies little
- Uncertain exercise program
Nothing’s Changed
We are a society built on the concept that we need immediate gratification. We type in a URL in a browser window and if it hesitates, even for a three second count, it’s taking too long to load. If it hesitates for five seconds, it’s not worth waiting on. Go ten seconds or longer and you’ll feel like you just waited five minutes for the page to load.
There’s an old saying in the restaurant business, when I was a waitress, we were told to always greet a customer at the door, whether we could seat them immediately or not. You needed to look at them and make eye contact immediately. Because 10 seconds felt like a minute to a customer if they are standing there waiting to be acknowledged.
So you can imagine, that a workout you perform for three routine days in a row and seeing no obvious results can be disheartening. Mentally, we know we need more than just a couple of days, but realistically too many of us are disappointed by the lack of results and we just give up.
Avoid Pushing Yourself Too Hard
When you desire quick results, you may push yourself too hard. You’ll overdo it on the weight lifting or try running as hard as you can rather than letting yourself build up gradually. This is called over training and it will leave you in an agony of soreness the next day. The pain will prevent you from working out and you’ll be aggravated by the lack of results in the face of so much discomfort for so little results.
Focusing too Hard on the Short-Term
Too often we spend our time wanting to be the right size or the right shape for a wedding, a vacation or even a party. So once you’ve targeted this short-term goal, it can be really hard to push past that date and workout any further. You have to remember that fitness is about daily exercise and regular workouts, not about three or four weeks from now and that’s it.
It’s better to spend your efforts on the correct form of the exercise and not the number of reps or miles you cover in the shortest amount of time. You also need to remember that nutrition is fundamental to any natural workout. Since it’s January, consider getting yourself in shape for something you enjoy doing in the summer whether it’s swimming, playing golf or hiking.
Workout so that you are in shape for those goals and once you achieve on those goals, you can enjoy swimming, hiking or more and you will remain active through those goals. I know one person who spends their summer months training to ski through the winter and the winter months, while they are skiing, training for long distance swimming in the summer.
If you work towards goals, always modify your goals as you achieve them, both in the short-term and the long-term. Don’t plan a workout program that has a stopping point. An exercise program that does you the most good is the one that keeps you working out regularly without a stopping point.
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