Five ways to maintain your early-year fitness motivation as 2020 wears on.

how to stick to healthy habits in 2020 Men's Fitness UK

1. Keep Track

To be successful at anything, consistency, accountability and motivation are key. Forming new habits is the first step to exercise longevity. One way of doing so is through a simple tracking app on your phone – MyFitnessPal and 8fit are just two of many out there.

Apps like these allow you to set a goal, check it off and prompt you each day as a reminder. This enables the monitoring of your exercise and activity through a graph of your compliance, which holds you accountable for achieving each goal.

Set goals for exercise, eating, hydration, organisation and recovery, but be realistic and only set goals you can commit to. Once you’ve achieved your target for 30 days and have a score of over 80 per cent compliance, you should review and set yourself a new, yet slightly harder goal.

2. Be Prepared

It can be too easy to grab food on the go or forget to pack gym kit when we leave in the morning.

Instead, plan your nutrition and training effectively by preparing your meals in advance of the day or week ahead and keeping a spare gym kit under your desk.

3. Mark the Start

We are all on separate health journeys. However, your levels of motivation are key to your success and provide the evidence on whether you’re improving.

If you’re about to start a fitness routine, take an assessment: it could be a photo, fitness test, blood pressure – anything that shows evidence of your current health.

Each month, repeat every test in the same order. That’s crucial, because you will only become demotivated if you can’t or don’t see the benefits of your lifestyle change.

how to stick to healthy habits in 2020 Men's Fitness UK

4. Prioritise Enjoyment

The gym shouldn’t feel like a boring routine that simply ticks a box for you. To keep yourself developing, learning new skills and challenging your health in a variety of ways, why not spend one session per week doing something completely different?

Salsa, meditation and Pilates classes are just a few examples. There’s a big wide world of exercise opportunities out there – go explore!

5. Stick to the Basics

You can achieve more than you think from just being consistent. Being healthy isn’t all about working out at the gym. Anytime Fitness groups health into five key pillars: exercise, nutrition, mental health, sleep, and work/life balance.

What will really make a difference is being consistent with these pillars and committing to making better wellbeing choices. When you feel good and looking after your health is natural, the results will come.

It shouldn’t feel like a struggle or cause anxiety. Reduce the things you know you shouldn’t have and increase anything you should. Simple.

 

Words: Marvin Burton, head of fitness at Anytime Fitness UK

Anytime Fitness has over 165 gyms across the UK and is the UK’s second largest private gym operator, with over 180,000 members. Visit anytimefitness.co.uk/find-gym to claim a free day pass.