If you don’t believe in New Year’s Resolutions, trying a new approach and making a resolution every Monday might help you achieve your health and fitness goals. Thinking of every Monday as a “fresh start” allows you to forgive yourself when you fall off track so you can quickly jump back into chasing your goals and living a healthier lifestyle. Interested in starting a Monday habit? FitClub has three ways to make it work for you, long-term.
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Don’t give up your long-term goals. Even though long-term goals can’t be achieved before the next Monday, long-term goals still play a huge role in living a healthy lifestyle and moving toward your individual vision of success. Monday resolutions allow you to break that long-term goal down into seven-day parts with smaller progress goals sprinkled along the way. Instead of waiting one year to see results or celebrate progress, you have fifty-two Mondays each year to check-in with yourself and see if what you’re doing is having a positive impact on your life. To make Monday resolutions work for you, keep thinking long-term, but start acting on short-term goals designed to get you to the ultimate finish line.
Set yourself up for success on Sundays. If your long-term goal refreshes itself every Monday, Sunday is the day you can start preparing for the new week. Thinking of Sunday as your new New Year’s Eve allows you to make sure your workout clothes are clean, your healthy meals are prepped, and each workout of the next seven days is scheduled to avoid any excuses keeping you from hitting your goals. While you pack your gym bag, write out your schedule, and prep your meals, you can clear your mind of any mistakes you may have made in the prior week and prepare yourself for a week free of last week’s guilt.
Too often, we think of “progress” as being determined by the number we see on the scale. Acting on a more short-term agenda, though, lets you better check in and see how you felt in the prior week. Did you sleep better? Did you have more energy or a more positive attitude? How did stress impact your mental and physical health in the prior week? Looking at our lives in the immediate seven-day time span allows us to better assess our strengths and weaknesses. Instead of looking back on the year as a whole and wondering where the time went, you only have seven days each week to re-assesses. This is also the right way to look at whether your goal is still important to you. If there are elements of your long-term plan that you don’t enjoy or that don’t seem to be working, reevaluate what you really want. You don’t have to quit on a year-long resolution if you can reevaluate every seven days.
Do you set weekly goals for yourself? What advice do you have for FitClub members looking for a fresh start every Monday?
