THREE GOALS TO MAKE YOUR HEALTH & FITNESS GOALS LAST

By Biagio Mazza

Today we are going to talk about something you could probably look up and see dozens of videos and read dozens of articles on, but I'm going to give you my specific spin to it here, and that's about motivating yourself to maintain fitness goals, specifically fitness activity goals. I'm going to give three pretty simple suggestions, but they're things I think that sometimes people forget.

One thing is to set realistic goals. You know yourself and if you have tried to exercise in the past, you will not go from exercising zero times a week to exercising six times a week and not have a problem. You might get injured, bad weather, whatever, and then if you set a goal that aggressively and you don't hit it, then you tend to fall off very quickly.

We mentioned how infrequent people are able to maintain goals from the beginning of the month to the end just in January, so trying to maintain even longer than that can be difficult. So number one is set realistic goals.

Number two is don't shame yourself, and what I mean by that is don't beat yourself up if you don't hit whatever goal it is.

So let's say your goal exercise three times a week and you only hit one time a week, don't beat yourself up and say bad of a person you are and how much a piece of garbage that you are. Those are the kinds of things that people often say to themselves inside their heads. They don't say them out loud and you don't usually say that to somebody else, but we really beat ourselves up inside in our own head, and those are the kind of things that can really create a negative outlook and really diminish your likelihood of maintaining that goal throughout time.

And the final is creating rewards for yourself. So, it doesn't have to be a reward of something that is anti what your goal is. So it doesn't have to be well if I exercise three times this week, then I'm going to eat three ice cream sundaes on Sunday. It may just be okay if I exercise three times a week, I'm going to set an hour aside in the evening and I haven't been making time to catch up on a show on Netflix that I really love. I'm going to set this time aside for myself and not think about anybody else, family or kids or responsibilities or whatever, just during this time give myself a little reward.

Those kind of things can go a long way with helping you maintain your goals and helping to keep you on track with your fitness activities, more so than just getting out there and doing your fitness activities.