With the New Year only days away, I wanted to take a moment and touch on a subject that is blatantly an obvious and annoying fact of January, failing your New Year’s resolution in the gym. You’ve spent 2017 eating like a pig and paying for it with a rise in your core measurements. Your cloths that used to fit look like they belong to someone else now. You feel tired, slow, and unhealthy. We get it, you feel the need to make a change. Yet, over 50% of New Year’s resolution gym goers will fail at keeping their gym routine by the time February comes around. This is a statistic as true as the law of gravity, what goes up must come down. In the end, failure comes down to the psychology of human nature. The truth is, we get bored with the gym. As an avid athlete myself, I can tell you that getting in the gym and pumping weights, doing long sessions of cardio, and staring at the mirror looking for change is just about the most boring thing in the world to me unless I set goals for myself and reach them. So, how do we avoid gym failure?
FIND SOMETHING YOU LOVE
The main issue with failing at your gym resolution is that you don’t fall in love with your routine. A recent Harvard study stated that a startling 70% of people who sign up for yoga give up on their routine by February, while 50% of gym goers are nowhere to be seen come the second month of the year, yet only 37% of CrossFit athletes fall off the wagon. We find that there is a very strong correlation to bored and failure.
Yoga, though very good for you, is an acquired taste; Its slow, difficult to master, and mundane. With nothing to keep the average person’s interests and a lack of real change to the body due to its lower impact/intensity characteristics, the attrition is understood.
The gym goer does a little better because they can be a little more motivated. They can set more goals, see more change, and be more involved in their gym routine. Yet, going to the gym by and trying to lift 3-5 days a week becomes more and more tiresome, especially when you don’t have someone there pushing you and making it fun like a friend or a trainer. In the end, without true grit you’ll likely fail at your routine.
CrossFit has this very special characteristic to it. You don’t decide what the workout is every day. You show up and are told what to do. You are challenged with goals that you have to reach and exceed as time goes on; PR’s are the ultimate goal. With its very high intensity characteristics, CrossFit gives the user quick visual results in the mirror, further motivating you to continue your routine and get in even better shape. Most importantly, CrossFit gyms act like second families. They are a very social event where you start to make friends with your fellow CrossFit attendees. A Sense of acceptance into a group is a very powerful motivator.
But CrossFit isn’t the only option. The takeaway from this article is that you have to find something that you fall in love with. Something that doesn’t feel like “work” or a “chore” when you’re getting ready to go. A martial arts gym is another perfect example. Being a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Black Belt myself, I can tell you that 80% of my friends are also a part of my team that I train with regularly. The sense of family, community, and brotherly bond is very strong at martial arts academies. But you can put a variable X in the place of yoga, gym, CrossFit, or Martial Arts. It doesn’t matter what you fall in love with so long as it is some form of exercise and healthy for you.
So don’t fall into the statistic, find what you love and make a lifestyle out of it!
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Good Luck!
References
Harvard Health Publishing. (n.d.). The health benefits of yoga. Retrieved from https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/the-health-benefits-of-yoga
CrossFit, Inc. (n.d.). About CrossFit: Health, fitness, and community. Retrieved from https://www.crossfit.com
Baumeister, R. F., & Tierney, J. (2011). Willpower: Rediscovering the greatest human strength. New York, NY: Penguin Press.
American Psychological Association. (2021). Motivation and willpower. Retrieved from https://www.apa.org/topics/motivation-willpower