We’re already into the final month of the year! What a ride it has been, with highs and lows and everything in between. At this time of the year, we generally tend to wind down and use the few remaining weeks to begin gearing up for the new year to come. During this ‘winding down’ phase, we can sometimes fall into the trap of letting things slide and rationalise it by telling ourselves “it’s been a long year”. Every so often, we use our ‘backsliding’ to form our new year’s resolution. For example, we may let our usual standard of health and fitness (e.g. consistency of exercise) slide and we tell ourselves that we’ll just start again in the new year. Instead of having to start again, why not continue the good habits that you’ve built up over this past year and allow them to drive you to further success into the new year? I challenge you to set goals for this month, and use them as a springboard for when January comes around.
As you reflect on the year to date, if your physical health efforts have been dampened as a result of illness, injury, or any other setback that you’ve encountered, there are still active steps you can take to keep moving towards your goal. This can range from rehab exercises to modified training programs and most importantly, working on improving yourself in the other aspects of health and wellness (i.e. emotional/mental, intellectual, social, spiritual, environmental). Each are just as important as the physical aspect. Improving all aspects of your wellness goes a long way in helping to achieve a balanced life. This balance can help take away the focus from being on the negative physical setbacks when they happen. We should also remember to celebrate all the success attained during the year. This can range from developing an understanding on the role nutrition plays in your specific health and fitness journey, to being able to do a full chin up, to recovering from an injury. Celebrating successes can motivate us to further success, while also providing encouragement when we fall short.
If you’ve been reading the articles throughout the year, and training with me I want to say thanks for the multiple opportunities to have been a part of your health and fitness journey. If for one reason or another you have had to stop training with me personally, I hope the articles throughout the year have been able to offer you a degree of support and motivation as you have *hopefully* continued on training. If you are stuck with your own training, or no longer training at all but would like to reconnect and pick up training again, I am more than happy to help you refocus and take you into the next phase of your health and fitness journey.
Being able to do my part and help you increase your knowledge, provide motivation and encouragement has at times, been challenging, but overall it has been a pleasure, and I look forward to continuing this.
I want to reaffirm you, and encourage you to keep on striving to be better than you were at the start of the year. Look forward to 2019 with plenty of excitement and anticipation, and a desire to continually grow into the best version of you.
DK