Oud en nieuw is eigenlijk fucking depressief. Je hoopt elk jaar weer op de hoofdprijs van de loterij, wint ‘m niet en beseft je dat er weer een nieuw jaar begint met dezelfde shit als het vorige. Je hebt al lange tijd weinig zonlicht gezien en het zal nog wel even duren voor dit verandert. Je eerstvolgende lichtpuntje zijn vrije dagen met Pasen, maar dat duurt nog tot maart en april.
Good Fitness Resolutions
However, it’s also the time of smiling gym owners, increasing visitor numbers on sites like this, crowded gyms, scales being taken out of storage, gym offers, and the latest diet crazes on the front pages of newspapers. In short: It’s the time of good fitness resolutions. After all, you have to have something to feel like the coming year will bring something better, and if the lottery doesn’t provide that, then you have to do it yourself.
These are the weeks when many gym owners can earn extra money. The Christmas vacation is over and with it, as far as I’m concerned, all the beauty of winter. Were it not for the colder weather expected for next week than it seemed with the weather of the past days, it seemed as if spring had started immediately after New Year’s. As mentioned, we will have to wait a while longer, but the harbinger of good weather, scanty clothing, and days at the beach are for many the necessary motivation to get off the couch again.
Unfortunately, most good intentions often don’t come to much or it doesn’t 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. However, regarding exercising more and paying better attention to nutrition, I can give you some tips to sustain this as long as possible and really be ready for summer or whatever goal you set for yourself.
Tip1: Set realistic goals and track your progress
Be concrete and specific about what you want to achieve and check regularly if you’re on the right track. The interim progress provides a good indication of whether you’re on the right track and can be very motivating, especially when, for example, the scale shows progress while you don’t see it in the mirror yet. If the results turn out to be disappointing, this also offers the chance to adjust your training or diet (or both) in time instead of continuing for months and getting demotivated because you don’t see anything happening.
To be able to measure your progress, you need to measure your baseline values before you start. Which values you measure depend on the goal you set:
- Losing weight, reducing body fat: Measure your starting weight and body fat percentage*, determine how many kilos you want to lose or how much you want to reduce your body fat percentage. Additionally, you can also measure your waist circumference, for example. Although it’s good to know that to reduce this, you need to work on the body fat percentage of your entire body and it makes little sense to do only abdominal exercises for this.
- 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 due to muscle mass or body fat. Because it’s difficult or even impossible for many to gain muscle mass without increasing body fat percentage, it’s good to regularly check your new weight and body fat percentage, for example weekly, and calculate how much you’ve gained in lean mass, i.e., body weight minus fat weight. You calculate the latter based on the body fat percentage.
- Improving fitness and endurance: Fitness is a very general term often used in the Netherlands to refer to endurance. You could have physical objective goals for this, but these are more difficult to measure without medical guidance. For example, the so-called VO2 max is a good indicator of your endurance because it indicates how much oxygen you can take in, but you can’t just have this measured weekly by a doctor. It’s more practical to simply do a “fitness test” on one of the many cardio machines and repeat this regularly to see your progress or lack of progress.
These are just a few examples of the most common goals. The goals are personal and can therefore be different, vague, or very specific. One person “just wants to lose weight,” the other wants to fit into the too tight wedding dress bought 3 months ago. One “wants to get stronger,” the other wants to be able to bench press 150 kilos. The chance of achieving vaguely formulated goals is much smaller because in those cases, work is done in an unstructured way, progress is often not measured, and one does not know whether things are going well or whether the training needs to be adjusted. The woman who still has a few months to go before the wedding and now stands in front of the mirror every week to see if it fits yet will practically be much more motivated.
What is realistic?
If you have little experience with exercising and dieting, you only find out what is realistic once you have started. In most respects, however, it’s more important that you have a goal than that the goal is exactly the maximum achievable. If you find out after a few weeks and seeing the results that your goal was too difficult or too easy, you simply adjust it. This does not apply, of course, to the example of the too tight wedding dress. In such a case, it’s useful if you estimate this somewhat realistically and don’t buy a wedding dress that looked beautiful on the mannequin but looks like a short skirt on you.
*For measuring your body fat percentage, always use a skinfold measurement and don’t rely on a scale with a body fat percentage function. A skinfold measurement is much more accurate (if done properly) and can also show where fat is stored, decreased, or increased, as it’s measured in various places (upper arm, thigh, abdomen, and chest).
Tip 2: Start slowly and only do what you can sustain!
These days, gym memberships are easier to cancel. However, when you were still tied to a yearly contract, gym owners were all too happy with the temporarily overenthusiastic new members who signed up around the New Year. You often see them working out like crazy for about three weeks and then experiencing a huge physical setback because their bodies can’t handle the sudden intensity anymore, followed by a mental setback because they couldn’t stick to their plan. These people start from scratch with training four times a week or more and don’t understand that after a while, the body says “enough!”. This can manifest as general weakening and fatigue, but also in illness like the flu due to decreased immunity. Then you want to start again, but you dread those four days a week of pushing yourself and you think “I’ll start next week.” Of course, that keeps getting postponed week after week, and you often only see them again in the spring with the second wave of registrations when the sun starts shining and you can wear less clothing to hide your figure.
The problem is often that they walk into the gym and see those annoying guys with tight figures who train all year round (sorry, don’t hate the player). It can’t go fast enough, so they start working out intensively and want to achieve the end result within a month.
If you haven’t done any sports for a while, you need to build up slowly. Start with one or two days a week and adjust the intensity of the training itself as well instead of starting aggressively instead of gradually building up.
The same goes for diets. Forget the Sonja Bakker diets where you force your body into starvation mode, lose a lot of weight in a very short time, but then gain it all back just as quickly when you’ve decided to do something as stupid as eating a piece of bread. Your body doesn’t like big changes in the first place and resists them. By gradually letting your body get used to changing circumstances.
More importantly, this offers a much greater chance that you will stick to it. Small changes are easier to incorporate into your daily routine and thus become habits more quickly. When one change has become a habit, you can then make the next adjustment (for example, train one extra day a week, eat a little less, etc).
Tip 3: Get Informed!
Know what you’re doing to get the most out of your training instead of aimlessly wandering around the gym looking at training equipment that still looks like torture devices to you. There are more and more gyms with the Basic principle: Pay little, but no guidance. This is ideal for many, but not for those who still don’t know how a treadmill works and think a dumbbell is a clock without a clapper. If you still don’t know much about how it all works in the gym and what you should do to achieve your goal, this is no excuse to mess around and see where it ends. After all, there’s plenty of information available on the internet, in magazines, but especially in the minds of those who have been training longer.
If you don’t know something, look around and find the person who has the body most similar to the body you would like to have. For example, if you want to become very muscular, approach the most or most beautifully muscular bodybuilder. In most cases, people enjoy explaining and in many cases, the person in question also knows what they’re talking about. This applies to a lesser extent to having a slim body than, for example, a muscular body because some people are just lucky to be naturally slim, have never done anything to lose weight, and therefore can’t tell you how to do this best.
The fact that you’re reading this means you’re off to a good start!
