If your New Year's resolution is to go the gym every year, New Year's Resolutions is not for you. Start making New Year life commitments and see how dramatically your life will change. You see, you cannot view fitness as a goal, obstacle or temporary activity you must partake in in order to look a certain way. Fitness is a lifestyle, a culture: a way of life. Embark on your fitness journey differently this year, instead of simply changing your activity level, change your lifestyle. Learn to be disciplined with nutrition by preparing and scheduling your meals for certain times of the day. Avoid bad lifestyle habits such as excessive drinking habits, eating fast foods, having long inactivity periods, or not drinking plenty of water. All this is possible with dedication, determination and drive. Attending the gym every day is not going to cut it because the gym is very similar to a hamster wheel when you have no idea what to do. All the equipment and machines can be a little overwhelming and the crowd you'll experience around this time of year is enough to make you quit. Follow some of these tips to help make 2016 the year you achieve and exceed your fitness goals:
1. Start Meal Prepping
Failure is usually the result of the lack of planning. If you" fail to plan, you plan to fail," hence, avoid not being prepared and disappointed by prepping your food. Meal prepping can mean different things to different people, it isn’t done one way but it's done your way. First, analyze yourself to determine your goals. If you are planning on losing weight, make sure the different foods you cook are low carbs, low fat and include more protein, vegetables, and fruits. On the other hand, if you are looking to bulk up, include ample of protein with right mixture of carbohydrates and unsaturated fats. Second, determine your food preferences. You will fall off if you do not like what you're eating, therefore pick a variety of foods that you enjoy. For instance, if you are more of a seafood person, include salmon, tilapia, mixed vegetables, broccoli in your meal prep. Lastly, have large containers to store different foods. Meal prepping in its most basic terms is the storage of different types of foods that you can combine daily to have several meals. Therefore, prepare a container full of rice, one with tilapia, another can contain mixed vegetables.
2. Take your Workouts Outside
Remember your first day at the gym thinking why am I doing to myself? Constantly running a treadmill while watching other people sweat. Fitness is not enclosed in a gym or at facility, it is inside all of us. Fitness is the spark within you that pushes you to move, pushes you to get better and it’s the desire for self-improvement and betterment. Hence, start taking your workouts outside especially if your goal is to lose weight. There are ample of things you can do outdoors, from running the stairs at a stadium, to running on the beach and doing aerobics and anaerobic exercises that uses your body and functional movements. The closer you can get to nature, the faster nature will take its course and the quicker you'll achieve and maintain the fitness lifestyle.
3. Keep up with Fitness trends and workout videos
The #1 excuse people make to justify why they do not workout is the phrase "I don't know what to do." No one is born with great knowledge, it is something worth working for because it can change the quality of our lives. Living in the world we do today, the internet contains countless amounts of resources from apps such as Nike Training to millions of Instagram profiles you can follow and learn a different workout on a daily basis. Reading blogs such as this one or surrounding yourself with other people who follow the fitness lifestyle is a great way to stay motivated, inspired and structured.