Happy New Year- and yes, it’s January again! After often an indulgent December, It’s definitely the most popular time to start a new fitness activity, take up a sport, open a gym membership and make changes to your lifestyle for the better. This is always a positive move to make changes to your routine and diet for the better, however it’s not always something that is easy to stick to. Consistency is absolutely key to improving fitness, strength and health, and although it always has to start somewhere, by February, many struggle to continue what they started or reach the goals they set in the first few days of the new year.

Some of the difficulties include setting expectations too high in too short a time, such as aiming to go to the gym every day, or reaching a certain weight when lifting in the gym, or a certain distance with running that is too ambitious for the time and the baseline you are starting from. Your body needs time to adjust to new activities or intensity of work-outs. This can affect motivation to continue with the activity when you feel you aren’t progressing as much as you’d hoped or thought you would. But it can also lead to injury- where the body isn’t quite ready or conditioned to the task you are expecting it to be able to do.  Here at our Flex Physiotherapy clinic near Didcot and Abingdon we can help a whole range of different injuries, however our aims and patient-centred goals are also to keep you healthy and work towards goals in a healthy way to prevent injuries.

So, how can you keep your fitness goals past January and beyond?

Set small achievable goals that you can change very few weeks. It’s good to try and make these goals more grounded and holistic, such as ‘attend the gym three times a week’ rather than reading a specific weight in an exercise. Part of the benefits of regular exercise is the positive effects on energy and mental health, not just physical appearance or isolated strength or power. A Physiotherapy MOT assessment, which you can get here at Flex Physiotherapy near Abingdon, can be a nice way to start the new year that looks at your strength and ability and can help set achievable realistic goals based on what you enjoy and you;d like to achieve.

Make sure rest and recovery is scheduled, this is where your body recover sand regenerates to be able to keep training, its so important.

Make sure you are getting enough calories. Its easy in January to cut right back on intake as an indulgent December, and things like the dry January challenge are great, however if you are trying to build both strength and endurance, calories, in particular carbohydrates and proteins are so important. At our new Physiotherapy and wellness hub opening very soon in the new year, we will also be having a resident Nutritionist which can further assist you with your nutrition plan.

Make sure the activity is something you enjoy, is realistic and practical to attend regularly- this includes considering how long it would take you to get to the gym after work in rush hour, looking at the times of the exercise classes you wanted to do to make sure it fits with your schedule, and maybe planning to go with a friend which makes it easier to stay motivated.

Give yourself some slack, show some self compassion– its not realistic to  attend every scheduled work out- some things in life are unpredictable with illness/family pressures/hard work deadlines or simply low energy days for no reason- yes these do happen! What’s more important is about making sure you are able to slowly get back on track and not letting it affect your longer term goals and motivation. ’Slow and steady wins the race’.

Good luck, and you know that the Flex Physiotherapy team are always here for you if you need help setting goals, keeping you on track or sort out any niggles you have along the way.