Conquering Your Exercise Goals Forever!
By Gale Ruttanaphon
New Year is the time for a fresh beginning where we make goals to grow and improve ourselves.Unsurprisingly the most popular New Year’s resolutions center around health, whether it’s to lose weight or to start exercising.
Everyone starts the new year full of hope, motivated to make this year the best one yet. Gyms are full and buzzing with new members. You have to fight for a treadmill like your kids fight for a swing in Benjasiri Park.
Yet, just two or three months into the new year, treadmills are once again available in abundance as membership thins out. So, what happens? Why are we so bad at following through on our goals?
Problem 1: We often set outcome-based goals
Imagine you want to get back into shape and you set a goal to lose five kilos. You have summoned the energy to follow a restrictive diet plan, you’ve been eating only what the diet prescribes, and finally, you’ve reached your goal weight—for now. However, as soon as you go back to your normal eating, you find yourself slowly regaining the weight you’ve lost, often with a little extra.
Achieving your goal only changes your life up to the moment when you achieve the desired outcome. However, if you maintain the same eating habits that led to your original weight gain, you will be stuck chasing the same outcome forever because you never fix your routine.
Dieting > weight loss > normal eating > weight gain > dieting > repeat. This outcome-based goal can create a yo-yo effect. To make lasting change, you need to change your routine or habits.
In this example, rather than following a short-term diet that you cannot stick to forever, you could develop a habit to eat mindfully. Mindful eating encourages you to slow down and eat with awareness, so that you can savor your food more intensely. Mindful eating is not a diet; it focuses on how we eat, not what we eat, so we can incorporate it into our everyday lives without feeling deprived.
When you set a habit-based goal rather than an outcome-based goal, you are aiming to achieve a lasting change that becomes a part of your long-term lifestyle.
Problem 2: We often start with goals that focus on drastic changes
After my first pregnancy, I found out that I had diastasis recti—outer stomach muscle separation. I vowed that I would get my core back and embarked on a daily core retraining routine that consisted of doing 10 minutes of exercise, three times a day. I was so motivated that even on the days when I couldn’t exercise in the morning or at lunchtime, I would do all 30 minutes of exercise at night.
I kept that routine up for an entire month, then I began to slip a little, then a little more. Eventually, I gave it up entirely. The time commitment was just too much.
After my second pregnancy, I was left with an even worse separation. This time, I decided to do things differently. I decided to break it down into smaller chunks of exercise I could do each day, so it wouldn’t feel like a massive time commitment. Each night, my routine consists of three sets of two minute core exercises. So, six minutes in total instead of 30 minutes. It has been a slow postpartum recovery for me, but after six months, I’m starting to feel strength in my core.
Many of us focus on a drastic goal, like going to the gym four times a week when we have never exercised before, or losing the kilos we’ve gained over the last three years in one year—but when the change is so extreme, we are more likely to backslide than move forward.
I want to invite you to make the shift from this all-or-nothing approach to an approach that focuses on making an incremental, positive change each day. All positive changes, no matter how small, add up in the long run to incredible progress. You just need to be consistent and patient, not perfect!
Problem 3: We often set goals based on what we think we “should” do
“I don’t have time to exercise,” is probably one of the most common things I hear people say. Especially for many new parents, it often feels like you’re getting by with barely enough sleep, let alone finding time for exercise. Meanwhile, you know there are other parents who are equally busy with their babies, equally tired, and also faced with the demands of a full-time job, yet they seem to be able to fit exercise neatly into their schedules.
Are these people endowed with an unlimited supply of motivation that enables them to stick to regular exercise? The answer is much simpler. Those who want to exercise will find the time, even in the busiest schedules.
We often set goals based on the idea that we should do something. “Should” goals rely on motivation that is fleeting and unreliable. If you need to be motivated to get up every morning to exercise, you’re likely to fall short. What you need is commitment, but that only comes if you truly want to do something. Knowing you should exercise and actually having the commitment and internal yearning to get up and do it are two very different things. To create lasting change, you need to want to do something rather than thinking that you should do it.
Recipes for kicking goals
We set goals with the best of intentions of achieving them, and by setting habit-based goals we increase our chances of succeeding. When we set habit-based goals rather than outcome-based goals, focused on small changes rather than drastic changes, and begin with “I want” rather than “I should”, then we can create long-term change and avoid setting the same goals year after year.
This article was originally published in BAMBI Magazine iJanuary 2020.
About the Author
Gale is a wife, a mother, and founder of My Mummy First, www.mymummyfirst.com, her passion, and her business. Gale experienced the benefits of exercise and living a healthy lifestyle during her pregnancy. She now uses her knowledge to help other mums recover safely and regain health and confidence after birth.