Encouraging proactive action in order to improve your health and fitness is always central to one’s role as a physical educator, exercise physiologist or personal trainer.
Procrastination is always the enemy of achieving any positive outcomes, particularly in respect of your health.
In an upcoming post, we will look at many of the mistakes common to beginners attempting to improve their health and fitness.
One of the most common mistakes made is making too many changes all at the same time.
By this I mean, the typical “New Year’s resolution”, whereby starting on January 1st, the person vows to change their exercise patterns, eating patterns, drinking patterns etc.
In essence, they commit to change their entire lifestyle.
Whilst this is an admirable objective, the methodology by which they effect this change may be flawed.
Due to a complex set of interrelated factors, which they have maintained for a number of years and are integral to their lifestyle, this is often a particularly difficult task.
As seen in the post “behavioral change: a staged approach”, effective change, (that is one that is permanent) needs to be supported by an adequate and staged educational process in addition to a readiness and appreciation of the positive values of the intended change.
What often happens as a result of all this change is that somewhere along the line it becomes too difficult to maintain.
Work, unrealistic expectations, social life, family life, injury, a lack of adequate progress, sickness, holidays, motivation or just life in general presents challenges that make maintaining this new regimented and structured lifestyle difficult.
Typically one aspect of the change cannot be maintained. As a result, the whole process collapses, as the individual sees their “resolution” as a whole process, not a sum of the parts.
When one part of this whole process cannot be maintained the individual loses motivation to maintain their commitment to all the other processes.
A more graduated approach, where the individual addresses different aspects of this change in a progressive manner may for many people be more appropriate and effective.
For example, perhaps an individual may consider as their first step just one stage of this process, let’s say to start a gradual and appropriate exercise program.
Once this has been undertaken successfully, you could gradually introduce the second stage of program, perhaps modifying your eating processes.
This approach lessons the amount of stress and expectation an individual places upon themselves and make their success much more likely.
In all eventuality they are much more likely to be able to cope with difficulties presented by modifying one aspect of their lifestyle rather than attempting many simultaneously.
So, perhaps this year it’s time to make your “November resolution” now, and start the first phase of your lifestyle change.
It will make your traditional “New Year’s Resolution” much more likely to be successful!
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