I don’t really have all that much to do with New Year resolutions.  I don’t hold with them too much personally, for reasons I’ll get into in a minute, and professionally I have never observed a rise in interest in UP’s personal training services at this time of year (the approach to summer is our seasonal high).  This latter point is most likely because we are a highly specialised business not culturally or economically suited to whimsical purchases, in fact we genuinely try to put off the uncommitted from hiring our services as time after time I’ve seen that they don’t get true value for money from what we do.  UP offers fantastic value because we save months and years of wasted effort, and help people achieve results that would have been impossible without us, but it comes at the price of commitment and discipline.  A resolution made on January 1^st just doesn’t cut it very often in the unyielding world of physical improvement because that first step, as important as it may be, is of the same actual value to your results as the second, the third, the fourth…

All of which brings me to the good intentions of New Year Resolutions.  If I am thinking uncharitably (and one of my recent resolutions is to be more understanding and empathetic!), I would pour scorn on the countless sheep who flock to the gym in the first week of every January, signing their lives away in Byzantine contractual agreements with big chain gyms that lock you in forever, and who laugh all the way to the bank in the full knowledge that the majority of their new members / victims won’t darken the gym door with their presence once February rolls around.   However, I don’t think this way and I get more frustrated with the fitness industry that sells quick fix solutions to over eager punters rather than trying to provide people with the right long term assistance.  This is of course also the silly season for the fat loss TV shows that are so damaging to the participants’ fragile emotional states, as if getting healthy and moving away from morbid obesity should be treated as a race with rewards and punishments.

Our fitness and our overall well-being are the things that should be amongst the most valuable and cherished in our possession.  Binge eating, with the justification that “It’s OK, I’ll start my diet tomorrow”, crash dieting, and delaying a new “health regime” because “it is November and I’ll wait now until the New Year” are all foolish, shortsighted, and deleterious to our health, vitality, and longevity.  And before I sound too much like I am preaching and that I don’t understand the all too human mindset that leads individuals to make such consciously bad personal decisions, let me come clean and admit that for many years I would binge eat on sweets, ice cream, and as many refined carbs as possible whenever I was bored, fed up, or stressed.  And whilst my exercise and the rest of my diet allowed me to cosmetically get away with it (most of the time), over the years it had a cumulative negative impact on my health that took a fair bit of work and sacrifice to fix.  I learned my lessons the hard way, and if I can help just one other person from avoiding some of those mistakes then I’ll be delighted with a job well done.

You see, my objection to New Year resolutions stems from the realisation that it encourages a procrastinating, self indulgent mind set in the run up to January 1^st, and that in far too many cases it imposes a deprived mind set in the period following that most individuals just can’t wait to break free from at the first sign of a struggle.  It also comes from the fact that I am pretty damn certain that if you were incredibly motivated to make a change in your life you would do it without requiring the artifice of the start of a new year.  Far better in my opinion to do what all goal setting experts tell you, and that is to pick a long term goal that you can genuinely envisage and that you (not someone else) intrinsically desire, and then break it down into short and medium term goals.

This is exactly what I do with my own training, although less so these days as so much of what I do now is an experiment to see what new strategies and approaches work best and in what way, and always in the development of the UP business.  Perhaps the business analogy is a useful one for us to get our head around as it should highlight the ludicrousness of waiting until New Year.  I have various commercial goals for UP, in many ways they are fluid as one needs to adapt to changing circumstances and priorities, but even as I write this blog if I look to my left there is a whiteboard with a series of 6 month goals that I use to drive myself forward and keep me on the straight and narrow.   There is obviously nothing ground breaking or revolutionary in this.  Now imagine for a second where UP would be if I kept making a set of goals but then constantly delayed them because “it’s the wrong time of year”, or “I feel too flat and stressed”.  And then I couldn’t be bothered to do much work in November and tricked myself into thinking that I’d redouble all efforts in January.  And then for the first few weeks of the new year I killed myself with work, my mind and my body rebelled, I burnt out, lost all motivation, and then crashed.  I don’t think the business would be too healthy do you.  You may find this a ridiculous example because no sane persons would act so irresponsibly with their business and livelihood.  And I agree 100%.  But then why would SO many allegedly rational beings act in exactly this way with the most precious commodity they will ever possess, their health!  So it is with this firmly in mind that I object to the feast or famine, boom or bust disposition that marks out the typical New Year resolution.

I don’t want to end today’s blog on a note of negativity.  I’ll slightly contradict something I wrote earlier and admit that for some characters the first step can be the hardest, and just taking that sometimes intimidating first step into a gym can be the start of a very special journey.  Resolutions are not bad things at all, and in varying guises all successful individuals use them to their own advantage.   If the Christmas break is a time for soul searching and introspection, which it most often isn’t but is something we could all benefit from, then coming out of that break with a fresh perspective and resolve is in many cases natural and to be encouraged.  My own personal period of introspection and new resolutions almost always follow a holiday, and this year I timed a family break to South Africa with the Christmas holidays.  I’ve come back with a resolution to work on removing stress from my head and spending more quality time with my young children, but it’s just a coincidence that this has been timed with the New Year.  If you have decided to make some changes to your life recently, I’m very curious to ask you two questions (and you should answer them at least in your own head, and if you want to share please do add a comment below) – what are the changes, and why did you wait until now to start?

PS: don’t forget to share / like this with the buttons on the left of you think you know anyone who might benefit from this advice.