Gyms are jammed. Shops are sold out of workout gear. Supplements are mixed up. Everyone is ready to go.

It’s January. Time to get after your fitness goals and become the best possible version of you.

But… is it going to end up like last year when you gave up mid February?

Can you keep it up? Will your motivation stay around or will it run away faster than 90% of new gym members?

Time and time again you see it. But why does it happen….

And more importantly how can you stop it?

#1. Temptation to CHANGE EVERYTHING can be too strong:

Before you super commit. Before you assume that people will think you’re a loser because you can’t keep up, you need to sit down with someone who’s done this over and over. They can tell you that it’s not an overnight trick. You’ve spent more than 90 days getting out of shape, so assume it will take more than 90 day s to UNDO.

That’s not how training to lose weight, get lean and toned works. It’s a process you need to learn.

#2. Start slower than you want to:

As soon as you want to REALLY START, just hold back a bit. If you think you’re starting too slow, you’re probably still starting too fast. The faster you go and the more “stuff” add, the more likely you are to fail

Just show up. Get to the gym 3-4 times a week for 45-60 minutes and make it a habit. Get used to it and build it into your schedule so that you have set days and times you go. This will make it harder for you to talk yourself out of going, if the weather is bad or you’ve had an awful at work. Which brings me to my next point….

 

#3. Understand the difference between will power and habit:

Habits are everything. You can will yourself to do every class and exercise under the sun and eat well for a few weeks, but once that becomes mundane and you run out of motivation what next?

You can’t will youself to put down the pizza at 2am and get to bed because you’ve a 6.30am training session in the morning. IT HAS TO BE HABITUAL. Habit is EVERYTHING.

The questions you need to ask youself is, how long to you want to be lean, fit and healthy for? If it’s more than just a few months you need to look at your habits and behaviors to change them slowly.

95% of people that rush into dieting for fat loss diet rebound with 6 months. This will happen to you too if you take off your arm bands and dive head first into the deep end, because you’ve just done all this stuff, started artificially and haven’t grown it into your lifestyle.

You need to learn the process. How to actually train, eat and sleep. Just get in and started learning how. Get involved in the process rather than the outcome and things will be become lone term, I promise.

#4 . Beginners don’t need the most advanced training diet plan out there plan:

Training as a beginner gets results doing quite little of the right stuff. Some people think they need to train really hard and “push past the limits” or have “no rest days” or “any other shit you see online”

Milk the new gain period for as long as possible before you really need to commit. There’s no need for all the added work that you think you need to do in order to get results. You could do 6 days a week for two hours each…. Or you could get very similar results from 3 sessions a week for 45-60 minutes each of focused training with a coach.

#5. Make it simple and easy to keep it up.

This is a mix of all the previous points. If it’s too hard, too complicated or too repetitive you won’t look forward to it. If it involves too much brain power, it’ll be too easy to say “ah feck it I won’t do it”

You won’t be looking forward to it if it’s too hard. You’ll be dreading coming in, dreading seeing the trainer, dreading the workout for the day and dreading the soreness coming your way tomorrow.

It’s not a sustainable process going at it that way.

Listen I’ve seen it time and time again, people never coming back after two weeks, because they’ve put too much load of themselves.

Motivational problems, burnout, injury, are all potentials. Results you get from slow and steady approaches aren’t as fast but they’ll be close and if you’re in this for more than two months, you’ll get there anyway. You need to ease yourself away from the “ALL IN” mentality.

No one who’s fit and lean, literally no one, who’s fit and lean, got there by absolutely killing themselves day in day out. They got there gradually over time!

Sean

If you want to make it the year you actually stick to a plan, get results and never look back, click below to Trial SB Fitness’ Fit28.