Our 3 tips for keeping a Healthy change going
If you’re looking for some pointers to keep up your new years resolutions, then this post is for you.
No need for a massive post this time, the best and longest lasting changes are almost always small, its doing them for the long haul that makes them worthwhile!
Our 3 tips for keeping a healthy change on track are:
1. Avoid all or nothing!
Lots of people start with the intention of achieving 100% of their goals - no sugar ever, exercising every day, or meditating every morning etc.
The problem with committing to 100% is that life doesn’t always allow for 100%. So often it feels like once you have gone off track then there is no point getting back on!
You tell yourself that it will never work and you fail back into your pre-resolution pattern. Getting off track is normal! The secret is to accept that it’s going to happen and get straight back on.
After a tiring day at work it’s easy to feel the urge to skip your exercise. Exercising before work means that you have prioritised the important (your long term health) over the urgent.
2. If exercise is your resolution, consider doing it in the morning.
If you're one of the people heading back to work this week, you probably already know that it’s harder to fit a workout in when work takes up so much of the day.
After a tiring day at work it’s easy to feel the urge to skip your exercise. Exercising before work means that you have prioritised the important (your long term health) over the urgent.
3. Listen to your body.
Changing can be tough on your body. If regular exercise is new to you, taking a rest day is super important and can help you avoid an injury.
Getting a checkup to see if everything is working the way it should is also a great idea.
As always, we wish you the best of luck with your new goals, please let us know if there is anything we can do to help you achieve them!
4 Keys to making successful New Year's resolutions!
If you are keen to start your year off right and really stick to your New Year’s resolutions, then read on.
HOWEVER, if you haven’t yet watched Martin’s video on the 3 biggest mistakes people make with New Year’s resolutions, then I suggest you click the link above and watch that first.
Done that? Great.
Now that you have seen what to avoid when MAKING your new years resolutions, the real question is:
How do I stick with my New Year’s resolutions so that I can achieve something?
It’s the perennial struggle. As Martin talked about in the last video, it is important that you make you goals right in the first place, but its equally as important to know how to make them work for you.
in today’s video, Martin talks us through his tips to really set yourself up for success with your resolutions, how do you prioritise, and how do you turn them into habits that become part of your routine for the rest of your life time, not just while your levels of will power hold out.
As always, for those of you who would prefer to read, the video has been transcribed below.
Hi, Martin here from Align chiropractic and this is the second in our series of New Year's resolutions videos.
Last time we went over the biggest mistakes that people make in setting New Year’s resolutions,, and today we're going to flip that around and give you some really simple tips that you can use straight away, to make the next year the healthiest year for you.
The most important thing when you're making resolutions to improve your health is, first of all:
Start really, small.
So if you're wanting to get fit and part of that is you're wanting to increase your upper body strength and you are going to do push-ups, you might be able to do 10 the first day, that doesn't mean you can do 20 and 30 and 40 day after day after day.
That sort of radical change can get you hurt, and it will tax your willpower really fast which is no good at all.
If you start really small, the goal on day one is to do one pushup, and if we expand that out you can apply the same thing to running, to going to the gym, to doing any sort of healthy habit; it's easy to succeed.
When you succeeded, when you've successfully been able to do just a very small behavior but you repeat that small, easy to achieve habit day after day, it starts to build a habit.
Habits are the superpower behind successful resolutions.
What I mean by that is a habit doesn't cost you in willpower; you do them automatically.
If your habit in the morning is you get up and have a glass of water, you don't have to force yourself to do it, it happens automatically.
The thing that that derails most resolutions is where we’re relying on willpower, doing something that's too big, too ugly, too uncomfortable, that we have to will ourselves to do it day after day, and then we wake up by morning we don't feel like it, and all of a sudden our streak is gone, our lack of willpower has won.
Small resolutions where we're looking for just a little bit of success is much more successful.
It also avoids us injuring ourselves and the general if we're doing a physical exercise, you're looking to increase it by a maximum, not a minimum, a maximum of 10% a week while building a habit.
That keeps it easy to succeed and it gives you your muscles, your ligaments, your tendons and your nervous system time to adapt to a new pattern of behaviour while are you building that habit.
Make it easier to succeed and hard to fail.
So our second thing is:
Pick the most important thing.
We spoke last time of having too many resolutions being a problem.
Just pick one area, one resolution that you're gonna stick to and the most important one. so if your goal was not so much about getting fit but more about losing weight, you've got a choice there, you can either have a resolution where you're going to change some aspect of your eating where you going to eat more vegetables or you’re going to eat less sugar or something like that, or you could look to exercise more and all the research shows that if you want to lose weight, for 99% of people actually, diet trumps exercise.
You can’t work out past a bad diet.
So, dial in the diet first because then you can build in habits before you try to change too many things.
You also create a really positive domino effect where once you've started eating better you kind of naturally feel like being more active and exercising.
You get this virtuous cycle where you eat better, so you exercise more, and you exercise more, you feel like eating better and so the cycle goes, and you can build a much healthier you with small, incremental and achievable changes.
If you're only able to change one thing, again it taps into this small change makes it easy to succeed, rather than creating this horrible lifestyle that is so alien to you that you want to stop it the moment that you can.
Third point is:
Don’t go it alone!
Rather than going solo and trying to do it just on their own willpower and their own resources, If you get a buddy, somebody else who wants to make the same change, or somebody else who will hold you accountable, then it taps into the way that we're wired.
We're wired to be social creatures and you increase your chance of successfully sticking with a resolution if you get a buddy.
Somebody who’s going to check in with you once a week to make sure you've done what you’ve committed to.
You can even ramp it up further, by adding consequences.
One of the the ones that I think is really amazingly successful is that there is research that shows that if you have a negative consequence for if you don't stick to your agreed resolution of eating more vegetables every day or of eating five servings of vegetables every day, you have to make a sizeable donation to an organization that you hate, so for example, if you are a Carlton supporter you have to give a thousand dollars to Collingwood and the way we're wired away from what we don’t want more towards what we do want, it’s a powerful incentive for people to stick to their resolutions.
The fourth thing is,
If you’re getting physical, get a check up.
If you're doing a physical activity, you're doing a fitness oriented New Year's resolution, then I'm going to strongly suggest that you get a checkup.
If you're a client of ours, or you'd like to be a client of ours, give us a call pop in we'll check to make sure that everything's working the way that it should, before you put your body under stresses that it's not used to, and related to that, we see soo many people who have ignored niggles and then end up with a more significant issue down the line.
So if your body is giving you feedback that the new regime is creating a bit of stress for you, don't ignore that, get it dealt with quickly so that you're not derailed by injury in sticking to your resolution.
I hope these videos will set you up for massive success in improving your health in the year ahead, shoot us a message and let us know what you think and what are new changes you're making in the year to come.
The 3 biggest mistakes with New Year's resolutions
If you, like most people, have tried year after year to make new year’s resolutions, only to find that before January ends, you’re out of the will power to keep them up and consign yourself to having “failed”, then this post is for you.
Resolutions can make a huge difference to your future, especially as most of us use them in an effort to improve our health!
The trick is to find ways to make them STICK and become part of your daily habits.
In the video below, Martin outlines some of the major mistakes that most people make in setting themselves new goals.
For those of you who prefer to read, the video has been transcribed below.
Hi there, Martin here from Align here from chiropractic and today's video is
really all about how to make good new year’s resolutions or more importantly in fact, how not to make bad New Year’s resolutions.
You see, the data on this, the statistics, the research in this area is that 80% of people when they make a resolution, don't keep it for long enough to get a health benefit from it and the vast majority of New Year's resolutions are about improving our health, things like exercising more, eating better, meditating more or whatever it is.
So there's a whole lot of social psychology research in this area and what I wanted to do today was first of all, make sure that you avoid the most common mistakes that people make when they're making a resolution, so that the year ahead can be a super healthy one for you.
So what are the big mistakes?
Too big
The first one is people, when they're making a resolution, they make the size of their resolution too big, they're sick of being flabby and unfit, and then they decide they're going to exercise every day at a super high intensity when they've been spending the previous year on the couch. It's a recipe for disaster.
Too Many
The second thing that's kind of related to the first, is that they look at this blank slate of the year ahead and they try and change too many things at once.
Now the problem with both of these things is not only that they don't work, but reason that they don't work is first of all they're too radical we really run our lives on habits.
We kind of go through the same routines and when we're in that routine or habit, our behaviour kind of comes with zero need for willpower, but all of a sudden, we're going to be doing things differently, we're going to be eating different foods and putting ourselves through the discomfort and discipline of going to the gym.
If we make too many of those things all at once, we tax our reserves of willpower super fast and a week later we are back to our old habits with no net benefit.
Going Solo
The last big mistake that people make is that they go alone, they do they resolve to do something but without any social support, without having a buddy to help them through.
You see we're social creatures and part of what is going to motivate us to get our the established patterns that we've got, is having somebody else that we're accountable to, somebody else that can support us when our willpower is feeling a little bit wobbly.
So if you want to avoid the three big mistakes in making resolutions, we suggest you take this in into mind:
don’t go too big,
don’t have too many and
make sure that you've got a buddy
We're going to have a follow-up video that it will show you exactly how to do those things.