Good fitness resolutions

New Year's Eve is actually fucking depressing. Every year you hope for the lottery jackpot, do not win it, and realize that another new year begins with the same shit as the last one. You have not seen much sunlight for a long time, and it will be a while before that changes. Your next bright spot is time off at Easter, but that will not be until March and April.

Good fitness resolutions

However, it is also the time of smiling gym owners, rising visitor numbers on sites like this one, crowded gyms, scales being brought down from the attic, gym promotions and the latest diet fads on the front pages of the newspapers. In short: it is the season of good fitness resolutions. After all, you need something to make you feel that the coming year will bring something better, and if the lottery does not take care of that, you will just have to do it yourself.

These are also the weeks when many gym owners can bring in extra money. The Christmas holiday is over and with it, as far as I am concerned, all the good things about winter. If colder weather had not been forecast for next week, the weather of the past few days would have made it seem as if spring had started immediately after New Year's Eve. As mentioned, we will have to wait a little longer, but the promise of nice weather, skimpy clothes and days at the beach is the motivation many people need to get off the couch again.

Unfortunately, most good resolutions often do not amount to much, or it does not take long before we fall back into old habits. The first packs of cigarettes are bought again after a week, and there is still no peace on earth. When it comes to moving more and paying more attention to nutrition, however, I can give you a few tips to keep it up as long as possible and to really be ready for summer, or whatever goal you set for yourself.

Tip1: Set realistic goals and measure your progress

Make a concrete and specific decision about what you want to achieve and regularly check whether you are on the right track. Interim progress gives a good indication of whether you are moving in the right direction and can be very motivating, especially when, for example, the scale shows progress while you do not yet see it in the mirror. If the results turn out to be disappointing, this also gives you the chance to adjust your training or diet (or both) in time instead of continuing for months and becoming demotivated because you see nothing happening.

To be able to measure your progress, you need to record your starting values before you begin. Which values you measure depends on the goal you set:

• Losing weight, lowering body fat: Measure your starting weight and body fat percentage*, determine how many kilos you want to lose or how much you want to lower your body fat percentage. In addition, you can also measure your waist circumference, for example. It is useful to know, however, that to reduce this you need to work on the body fat percentage of your entire body, and that doing only abdominal exercises for this makes little sense
• Gaining muscle mass: Measure your starting weight and body fat percentage and set a goal for lean mass gain. After all, you need to know whether an increase in weight is caused by muscle mass or body fat. Because for many people it is difficult or even impossible to gain muscle mass without also increasing body fat percentage, it is useful, for example, to have your new weight and body fat percentage checked weekly and to calculate how much lean mass you have gained, meaning body weight minus fat weight. You calculate the latter using the body fat percentage.
• Improving fitness and endurance: Fitness is a very general term that in the Netherlands is often used to refer to endurance. You could set physical, objective goals for this, but these are harder to measure without medical supervision. The so-called VO2 max, for example, is a good measure of endurance because it indicates how much oxygen you can take in, but you cannot just have a doctor measure that every week. It is more practical simply to do a "fitness test" on one of the many cardio machines and repeat it regularly to see your progress or lack of progress.

These are just a few examples of the most common goals. Goals are personal and can therefore be different, vague or very specific. One person "just wants to lose weight", another wants to fit into the wedding dress bought too tight three months from now. One person "wants to get stronger", another wants to bench press 150 kilos. The chance that vaguely formulated goals are achieved is much smaller because in those cases people start in an unstructured way, progress is often not measured and they do not know whether things are going well or whether the training needs to be adjusted. The woman who still has a few months until the wedding and now stands in front of the mirror every week to see whether the dress already fits will, in practice, be much more motivated.

What is realistic?

If you have little experience with training and dieting, you only find out what is realistic once you have already started. In most respects, however, it is more important that you have a goal than that the goal is exactly the maximum achievable result. If after a few weeks and after seeing the results you find out that your goal was too difficult or too easy, you simply adjust it. Of course, this does not apply to the example of the wedding dress bought too tight. In such a case, it is useful to estimate this somewhat realistically and not buy a wedding dress that looked beautiful on the mannequin but looks like a short skirt on you.

*When measuring your body fat percentage, always use a skinfold measurement and do not let it be determined by a scale with a body fat function. A skinfold measurement is much more accurate (if performed properly) and can also show where fat is stored, reduced or increased, because it is measured at several locations (upper arm, thigh, abdomen and chest).

Tip 2: Start calmly and only do what you can sustain!

These days, gym memberships are easier to cancel. Back when you were still tied to a yearly contract, however, gym owners were only too happy with the temporarily overenthusiastic new members who signed up around New Year's. You regularly see them train themselves into the ground for about three weeks and then suffer a huge physical setback because the body can no longer handle the sudden intensity, followed by the mental setback caused by the fact that you did not manage to stick to your schedule. These people start from nothing and train four times a week or more, and they do not understand that after a while the body says "enough!". This can show itself as general weakness and fatigue, but also as illness such as flu due to reduced resistance. Then you want to start again, but you dread beating yourself up four days a week and think "I will start next week". Of course, that keeps moving forward by a week, and you often only see them return in spring during the second wave of sign-ups, when the sun starts shining and you can wear less and less clothing to hide your figure.

The problem is often that they walk into the gym and see those annoying people with tight bodies who do train all year round (sorry, don't hate the player). Then it cannot happen quickly enough, so people train too intensely and want to have reached the final result within a month.

If you have not done any sport for a long time, you need to build it back up calmly. Start with one or two days a week and adjust the intensity of the training itself as well, instead of beginning too aggressively rather than building it up slowly.

The same applies to dieting. Forget the Sonja Bakker diets that force your body into starvation mode, make you lose a lot of weight in a very short time, and then make you gain it back just as quickly when you get the ridiculous idea of doing something as crazy as eating a slice of bread. First of all, your body does not like major changes at all and resists them. Let your body slowly get used to changed circumstances.

More importantly, this gives you a much greater chance of sustaining it yourself. Small changes are easier to incorporate into your daily routine and become habits more quickly. Once one change has become a habit, you can then make the next adjustment (for example, train one extra day, eat a little less, etc.).

Tip 3: Get informed!

Know what you are doing to get as much as possible out of your training, instead of wandering aimlessly around the gym looking at machines that still look like torture devices to you. There are more and more gyms built around the basic principle: pay little, but get no guidance. This is ideal for many people, but not for someone who does not yet know how a treadmill works and thinks a dumbbell is a bell without a clapper. If you still know little about how everything works in the gym and what you should do to reach your goal, that is not an excuse to just mess around and see where it ends. After all, there is plenty of information available on the internet, in magazines, but especially in the heads of the people who have been training there longer.

If you do not know something, look around and find the person whose body most resembles the body you would like to have. For example, if you want to become very muscular, walk up to the biggest or best-built bodybuilder. In most cases people actually enjoy explaining things, and in many cases the person in question also knows what he or she is talking about. This applies less to having a slim body than, for example, a muscular body, because some people are simply lucky enough to be naturally very slim, have therefore never had to do anything to lose weight and therefore cannot tell you how best to do it.

The fact that you are reading this means, in any case, that you have started well!