It takes most only a matter of weeks for their New Year’s Resolutions to fall apart.  Its the time of year where people get pumped up about changing their lives, start, and inevitably end up back where they started.

Why does this happen every single year? My most successful clients don’t have this problem because they changed their mindset, and took a different approach.  .

To absolutely crush your new goals this year, you’ll need to understand why “Resolutions” don’t work the way we always want.  Three common reasons are to blame.

1. Unrealistic goals.

You can’t accomplish a year long weight loss goal like “this is the year I will lose 15lbs” with a 2 week shred.  Unfortunately, you cannot expect massive change in a short period of time if you want massive results. For real change to happen, you need to embrace the small changes that happen on a daily basis. Wherever you are on the health spectrum, it took you some significant time to get there. It took time for yourself to build those habits and put on the weight, and now it’s time to undo all of that.

When we’re thinking about long term growth and progress, we need to invest time and effort into the equation. The only way to have success is to earn it. Think about what it takes to learn a new skill, such as fishing or cooking. With nutrition and exercise, it’s all the same.

With that said, the reason many resolutions fail is the simple fact that a “resolution” has an end. Bringing new change into your life is not something that should stop. Your mindset has to be different for real stuff to happen, as well as set you up for success in the future. You have to learn, practice, and repeat. Long term growth takes time, patience, and persistence.  You can still have a short term goal, but it needs to set you up for long term success.

2. You don’t know what to do or why you want to do it

Like anything, fitness requires constant attention and education. If you don’t have someone teaching you the how, what, and why, behind a concept or plan, then how can you possibly implement that change into your own life?  No one was born knowing how to workout or knowing what to eat.  Guys and gals, that is not the way it works.

The goal of the resolution is to kick start your year, sure. But what about kick starting your life? Ever think about why you need to change, right now? To win at anything, you’ll need to have the educational groundwork, and it starts with understanding why you actually want to change your life. The emphasis should be on yourself, not what everyone else may be doing.

From there, you create the right mindset when you learn something new and frame it in your own head for the future. To really dominate it this year, you have to be willing to learn the basics of fitness, nutrition, schedule management and prioritization. And, all that stuff has to be relevant to you, because it isn’t about the first four weeks of you getting your workouts in or doing food prep Sunday. It’s what happens after that early motivation wears off.

The education component teaches you how to respond when you have a bad day, to understand why you might get certain cravings, or how to squeeze in a solid workout even though you really “don’t have time.” Resolutions cannot be short term fixes, they have to be built around long term solutions.

The absence of social accountability.

Teams win. Period. Having people around you that are of the same mindset and have similar goals, will only lead to more success. When talking about motivation, people are not driven in the same way. Some people are intrinsically motivated, meaning they don’t need rewards or social validation to get themselves to do things. Others, need that more than anything. Having great people around you that support your goals and will hold you accountable can be crucial for things like consistency, organization, as well as bringing in new ideas, recipes, or training advice.

With a lot of new year resolutions comes a lot of frustration, mainly because people feel they need to do things alone or by themselves. Listen, you are not alone. There are other people out there that have similar problems. Other people have kids and struggle to get to the gym. Other people strongly dislike vegetables. And, other people really like pizza and beer.

The On Target Lyfe

What my coaches and I do at On Target is very unique. You aren’t doing whatever random things a group fitness instructor wrote on a napkin right before class.  We, as Certified Personal Trainers, are putting you through programming that is comprehensively designed by us as a team to train you to burn fat, get strong, and move well.  We want to help you grow in whatever capacity that may be. We demand hard work from you;  not perfection; but we also encourage you to be yourself, whatever that is. The culture here is inspiring, fun, and let’s face it; effective.  Because of how we do business we don’t see people fall off the radar after a couple short weeks.  We see people thrive.  They move towards their goals one change, one heart beat, one breath, one rep, one tic mark on the board, one workout, one week, one month at a time.

Written in collaboration with On Target Fitness Head Coach Ryan Yurista