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Promiscuous Fitness and Other Resolutions
6 January 2015
Allison read How to Find the Right Exercise Routine—and Stick with It! (again) and appreciated three of her favorite things: a good laugh, an efficient way to reinvigorate her workouts, and great advice for making ANY important change.
Tags: allison read, balance, change, new year’s resolutions
It’s that time of year. A lot of us are thinking about fresh starts and even resolutions. Some of us may even be thinking, “I don’t make resolutions!” But in my experience, almost all of us have a few changes in our lives we’d like to make, and some of those changes seem to be particularly tough.
I first blogged about Alissa Nutting’s article, How to Find the Right Exercise Routine—and Stick with It!, on 4 December 2012. When it was originally published in O, The Oprah Magazine, its title was Promiscuous Fitness which made me laugh and was a great description of Nutting’s indiscriminate (and futile) exercise efforts.
As I wrote two years ago, Nutting, “…gives a hilarious overview of her on-again, off-again relationship with exercise including her tendency to start a grueling program, stick with it for a few weeks, and then give it up altogether for a return to Ben & Jerry’s and her elastic pants. This pattern started in the 11th grade with Richard Simmons and only ended last year when she finally lowered the bar for her fitness goals and aimed for new behaviors she actually had a chance of achieving.”
If one of your new year’s resolution is related to fitness and you’ve struggled with that goal over the years, I think you’ll find the High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) Nutting recommends to be manageable and effective. I actually love working out so I don’t particularly struggle with that issue, but I do switch to HIIT workouts at least once a year and especially whenever I find myself on an exercise plateau. I’m doing it again this month and look forward to reinvigorating my current routine.
However, the most important lesson in Nutting’s article isn't about exercise. It’s really about how to make any difficult change more attainable. Often we reach for stretch goals in an effort to inspire ourselves and others. But these goals sometime set us up for failure because they are unrealistic and we overdo things in a effort to improve or to make up for past failures. This overdoing is actually counter productive to the longterm goal.
If you’re struggling with making a change in your life, I’d advise you to lean on two leading psychologists in the change management field that helped Nutting. “She combined Roy Baumeister’s suggestion in the book, Willpower, to ‘Set the lowest goal I could feel good about, then try to exceed by as much as possible,’ with Suzanne Segerstrom’s advice in the book, Breaking Murphy’s Law, that ‘When forming a new habit, choosing a sustainable behavior is critical.’”
With this advice in mind, maybe this year’s resolutions and goals will be just a little easier to achieve.
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Jessica
Jan 18, 2015
This is such great advice! I’ve already started making those little changes with regard to getting up and moving during the work day. So far so good… Thanks, Allison.