In January, I went to the gym every weekday. I ate healthy food, drank plenty of water, and made sure to give myself cheat days to stay in balance. It was all going remarkably well. Of course, as the New Year buzz wore off, I started letting go a little bit. Some work days just left no time to go to the gym. I got too lazy to prepare healthy food. My regular apathy kicked in.
By May, I had completely reneged on my New Year resolutions. As always. I felt that familiar bemusement that I had, yet again, believed “this year would be different”.
It struck me that if I did the same thing every year, of course nothing would change. This year could be different, but it would require me to actually do something different. So I tracked down some hacks to help me get back on track, and found that it doesn’t have to be difficult.
Stop wasting time on food prep
One of the major factors in the derailment of my goals was that preparing healthy meals just took too much time and energy. After coming home from work, no one feels like cooking. Takeaway is much more practical. That is, until I found out about fitness meal delivery kits.
Meal kits are one of the most convenient and useful hacks that not nearly enough people make use of. They work on a simple premise. You order a meal according to your preferences and all the ingredients show up at your doorstep, chopped and prepped. All you need is to follow some simple steps to cook your healthy meal.
You can get meal kits that are optimised to meet your fitness goals. They help you stay on track to your health goals, reduce wastage, and ultimately save you money you would spend on takeaways.
Ditch your gym membership
Okay, you don’t need to actually ditch your gym membership. But you’ve got to stop thinking of the gym as the only place to get a good workout. That thinking means you inevitably stop working out when getting to the gym becomes difficult or impractical.
Instead, download some useful fitness apps. The most basic fitness apps track your runs or similar activity, so that a treadmill becomes an unnecessary part of your fitness regime. Other apps go much further.
Apps like Men’s Health and Sworkit provide workouts designed to be done at home with no gym equipment. In Sworkit’s case, they use HIIT principles to give you an optimal workout in just ten to twenty minutes. You can, of course, work out for longer if you have the time and willpower, but the point is that you don’t have to.
With these shorter, more practical workouts, I have seen bigger gains than I ever did when relying on the gym.
Vary your schedule
Finally, one of the most important factors to remember is that humans get bored quickly. The workout that excites you now will begin to feel stale after a month or two. While it is all-too-easy to get stuck on a schedule that works, boredom will ultimately sabotage it.
Instead, try to shake it up. Add some yoga into your schedule if all you’ve ever done is strength and cardio training. Take the opportunity to try alternative dietary options that nonetheless give you the nutrients you need.
In other words, have fun. If you end up sick of your routine, you’re going to sabotage it anyway!
