Perhaps you were doing an excellent job on your fitness goals, but something happened, and you stopped. Maybe you suffer from burnout, injury, or illness. Regardless of the reason, you want to restart your fitness journey but are unsure where to begin.
You are one of 8 billion people. Statistically speaking, missing goals happens all the time. For example, 80% of New Year’s resolutions fail. That means you’re not unique if your fitness journey has been sidetracked. However, you want to get back on the saddle and restart your fitness journey to make real-life changes.
Before You Restart Your Fitness Journey
If you’re criticizing yourself for missing your fitness goals, the first step is forgiving yourself. There are many reasons you can fall off the wagon.
Unfortunately, that voice in your head can be convincing and easily sabotage your motivation and positivity. Thankfully, you don’t have to listen to your unproductive self-bullying. Instead, realize it’s frustration rearing its ugly head and not reality.
Reset Your Fitness Goals
Before restarting your fitness journey, you should re-examine your goals and determine why you stopped in the first place. You can start by making a list of your fitness goals. What are you trying to achieve? Perhaps some of your goals look like the following:
Although these goals seem reasonable, there are reasons why they are prone to failure.
Goals Can Be Too Vague
If you want to exercise more, you’re missing some essential details, such as “For how long?” “What kind of exercise?” “How often?” to determine what success looks like. You’re setting yourself up for failure without a clear definition of success. If you don’t make your goals more specific, you’ll have to restart your fitness journey to get back on track.
You Tried Making Too Many Changes
Let’s assume the three fitness goals mentioned are yours. Since they don’t overlap, you may try to do all of them simultaneously. You may try to change your ways on day one, like flipping a switch.
Unfortunately, habits are hard to break. Breaking them requires willpower until a new habit is formed. Doing too much too fast or working on many goals at once is a recipe for failure. Instead, focus on one goal at a time.
Start By Creating A Plan
A good plan increases your chances of success. In fact, the three goals above may seem like reasonable goals if you’re trying to stay healthy. However, if you don’t create a plan to accomplish those goals, you’ll likely miss the mark and have to redefine or restart your fitness journey again.
Let’s review these three fitness goals to see how planning can help you succeed.
Vague Goal: Exercise Every Day
There are many benefits of exercising. However, you don’t have to exercise daily to become healthy and fit. In fact, exercising most days of the week is enough to improve your fitness. Furthermore, rest and recovery are as important as exercising to maintain your quality of life and to stay active as long as possible.
Let’s make this goal more specific by asking yourself these key questions:
- Which exercise(s) will you do?
- How much time will you spend exercising?
- How often will you exercise?
- When will you exercise?
These questions will help define success. In fact, you may want to consider exercising most days to ensure you have time for rest and recovery.
Vague Goal: Eat a Vegetarian Diet
If you want to be a vegetarian or vegan, following a specific diet makes sense. However, you will likely find switching from one diet to another challenging. You may experience more frequent or uncontrollable cravings. As a result, your willpower will eventually break, and you may stop trying because it’s too difficult. Instead, try substituting slowly to give yourself time to adjust to the change.
If you’re trying to follow a vegetarian or vegan diet to lose weight, there might be a better way. Instead, explore other options. You may find another diet more suitable. You don’t have to sacrifice your favorite foods to reach your ideal weight.
Vague Goal: Get Eight Hours of Sleep Every Night
Sleep is essential to rest and recover properly. However, do you want to get eight hours of sleep because you think that’s the right amount? Although experts recommend seven to eight hours of sleep each night, every person is different.
Ideally, your goal should be to establish a consistent sleep schedule most days of the week, including waking up and going to bed around the same time every day. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to flip a switch with a new sleep schedule. Instead, you’ll have to make slow changes, such as going to bed a little earlier every night and waking up on time.
Track Your Progress
How will you know if you’re moving in the right direction? Tracking your progress in a fitness journal or app can be the best tool for accomplishing your goals. But how does tracking your progress help?
Tracking your progress helps you stay on track. For example, if you write down everything you eat, you may think twice about having a cookie for a snack and eat an apple instead. That’s because measuring or questioning your intentions or anticipated regret can change your behavior. In other words, you may change your mind when you realize it will negatively affect your efforts to reach a goal.
Trying to remember everything isn’t going to work. You’ll forget important details and won’t easily see how far you’ve come. As a result, you may become frustrated, give up, and have to restart your fitness journey again.
Tracking your progress helps focus your attention on your goals. Tracking enables you to visualize your fitness journey. You can compare where you were and where you are now to show you how far you’ve come, and it can help keep you motivated when you’re feeling like you’re not making progress.
Adjust Your Fitness Journey As Needed
Flexibility is critical for your success. In fact, you won’t be able to plan every nuance of your fitness journey. Instead, you’ll need to be open to making tweaks now and then because … life happens. For example, what if you run as part of your fitness journey but figure out you hate running? That’s OK! Exercising is hard enough, so you should always do exercises you enjoy.
You can certainly be fit and healthy without running. You may even enjoy walking or doing yoga instead. The only way you’ll know is if you try something new. Removing running from your plan and substituting it with something else is OK. No matter what you choose to do as exercise, it all counts.
For dieting, you don’t have to follow a diet 100% of the time to succeed. In fact, if you always try to follow a diet, you may experience cravings. Instead, try easing into a diet by finding healthy, balanced meals you enjoy. For example, eat a potato instead of french fries or swap soda for water.
Listen To Your Body
Even with a well-defined plan and steady progress, there will be times when you can’t follow it. For example, you could get injured, sick, or experience burnout.
Taking time off to rest, reset, and recover is OK. A short break won’t erase all your hard work, but it can help you recover, especially if you are starting or restarting your fitness journey. That’s why building in rest days is essential as part of your plan to recover both physically and mentally.
The Takeaway
You may have to restart your fitness journey for one reason or another. However, you can increase your success by defining what success looks like, making a flexible plan, tracking your progress, and resting when necessary.
As long as you’re making progress most days and adjust your plan as needed, you’ll reach your goals. A little progress every day is a victory. If you find your plan isn’t working, that’s OK. You can always redefine your goals and restart your fitness journey.
FitTrend’s mission is to help you along your self-improvement journey, promote an active lifestyle, and help you achieve your goals. Our journal can help you track your workouts, weight, mood, calories, and more. Also, FitTrend allows you to connect supported gadgets to your account to make it easier for you to update your journal automatically. Create your account today and start using FitTrend for free!
Disclaimer: No content on this site should ever be used as a substitute for direct medical advice from your doctor or other qualified clinician.
