Get a Fresh Start with These 5 Simple and Powerful Tips to Help You Achieve a New You – Don't Miss Out!

First of all,  we hope you had a fantastic holiday period with family and friends, and enjoyed the festivities with plenty of food, drink and nights out with those closest to you. To our friends in China, happy Chinese New Year today!

For a lot of us, New Year goals tend to focus around health, wellness and fitness — but finding that motivation and drive after the holiday period can be difficult. 

Generally, the first few steps are always the hardest so we would like to share our top 5 tips with you today.

1. Sit down and set your goals

It sounds very simple but I guarantee you a lot of us don’t do this.

This January I encourage you to sit down with a pen and paper and list down goals that you want to work towards and achieve this year.

Having short to long-term goals are something I believe works very well.

A short-term goal could be something as basic as aiming to take three litres of water on board a day for the first seven days of your new healthy lifestyle — allowing that to become a new good habit and moving on from there.

A medium-term goal could be to do a couple of 5-10k runs and work towards that long-term goal of a half-marathon, for example. 

2. Start small and build up from there

It is very common for people to dive straight into the deep end. Over the years, I have seen this happen to many and it only leads to burnout, injury or loss of interest within a couple of weeks — start small and go from there.

3. Choose the right path

We have all seen the contrast in the gym between December and January — the gym to yourself at Christmas and the queues for the treadmills come January. 

It is great that you have a goal to get fit and want to improve your health but my advice is to look at the different avenues out there before going down this route — you don’t always need a gym to improve your health and fitness.

The options now are endless — hikes, running, walks, biking or swimming to even a variety of clubs from yoga, pilates, running clubs to the endless amount of small studios and local clubs offering plenty of activities.

4. Get the basics right again

After the holiday season the best advice is to get back on track with the basics before you get a little more specific with your goals.

Water – Aim for a total daily intake of 2.5-4 litres, depending on the individual.

Sleep – This is another pretty basic rule that people need to focus on. It is an area that lets down many when chasing their fitness goals. Believe or not, it’s not the training or food plan you’re on that is not always working, a lot of the time it’s the fact you’re not getting the basics right first. Getting at least eight hours of sleep every night is one of the fundamental rules when it comes to having a healthy lifestyle.

5. Visualise, write down and assess your goals

Use a journal to log your daily progress or even better have a visualisation board to put all your goals on show for the year. We suggest you test and retest your progress every four-six weeks.

This could be anything from re-testing your body fat readings, comparing and repeating a benchmark workout or something as simple as re-testing your mobility/flexibility work that you started doing daily.

We hope you found it useful, please share your goals and progress with the Fit Democracy community to inspire others. Wish you all health, happiness and prosperity in 2020…