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With the new year upon us you may be thinking about new healthy habits involving anything that will improve the quality of your life and health for the better.
Oftentimes, the beginning of the year serves as a major stepping stone for anyone trying to implement something that is likely going to take them out of their comfort zone and challenge them to some degree. These resolutions often involve fitness and nutrition, but they’re only as good as one’s ability to stick to them. Far too often, we set lofty, arbitrary “goals'' for ourselves without truly thinking about what it’s going to take to build the habits needed to accomplish those goals.
An example of this would be someone who says, “I’m going to start going to the gym five days a week and start a new diet.” While the motivation in this sentiment is awesome, you can probably guess what happens to most individuals who go from 0 to 100 similar to this after a month. They fall off.
In this article, we’re going to discuss what habits actually are, create a framework to help implement healthier habits in a realistic means, and highlight a list of awesome habits to try to implement.
Believe it or not, there is no right or wrong way to define what habits are, and in the world of research, "habit" has taken on multiple definitions per how one plans to use and implement the concept of habits.
From a coaching point of view, one definition that I like is, "A habit is a process by which a stimulus generates an impulse to act as a result of a learned stimulus-response association." Essentially, this means that the habits we form are simply products from strings of learned cues, and this type aligns perfectly with fitness and nutrition. That being said, it can be incredibly useful to disassociate our daily behavior with the new habits we’re trying to build.
Why? Well, behavior can be heavily dictated by our moods which ebb and flow, so if we build habits and subconsciously associate them with different behaviors, then we have the off chance of developing poor relationships with new habits and potentially negative behaviors.
Picture this: if we’re trying to form a new habit like going to the gym or eating slightly healthier and we only did these when we felt happy and motivated, then we could build a bias toward these new habits with these behaviors and feelings. We want to avoid that and disassociate behavior and habits because we’re different every day and we don’t want to rely on aligning so many variables to execute new habits.
Now, when it comes to physically forming new habits, the process gets a little more complex because it’s more than simply “starting something new.” As you create new habits, you will need to remain objective about how you respond to different cues and find what works best for you.
Research suggests habitual health behaviors often fall into three categories.
Category one would include putting your running shoes on after days of doing so right upon waking up in the morning, then consciously deciding to run a mile. Category two would entail opting to go to the gym on a regular basis. It's an initial conscious decision and for many, once they arrive at the gym, it's an automated habitual process of completing a prescribed workout. Category three would be eating junk food when you feel stressed. It's an unconscious decision that is a product of an unconscious stimulus.
If you notice something, all of these categories involve habitually initiating some activity to produce desired outcomes. This is why it’s important to create a string of cues in order to follow realistic habits based on feasible goals.
As you read on, try to think about the habits you want to form in the New Year, then use the framework we discuss to curate cues that work for your individual context. Remember, how I form habits will be different from how you form habits, but the cueing process will be similar.
New fitness habits can take many forms and that’s why it’s so important to nail down some specifics and give some thought to realistically deciding what you want to accomplish.
These are all great goals that can help initiate a new fitness habit, but these end goals don’t really help us build the steps needed to achieve them, nor do they help us build a realistic habit framework.
Let’s use one of the examples above to provide you with an idea of how to format new fitness habits.
For the sake of commonality, let’s say you want to start going to the gym at least 3x a week throughout the entirety of 2021. That’s a lofty goal if you haven’t been going, especially when you consider that you’re going from 0 to 152 gym sessions to accomplish this goal. That’s an amount that will make anyone feel dizzy and this is even more true for those without a plan of attack.
Instead of trying to tackle the large goal right away, segment it out into three different sections. Create macro, meso, and micro goals that are designed to help ease you into new habits while also building cues to stimulate consistent habits.
An example of these goals could be:
This flow will help you ease into the process of going to the gym more frequently in a calculated means. It’s also completely normal to end up enjoying the process throughout the first few months and not needing this form of timeline! The point is to ease you into a habit change without overdoing it, then spinning your wheels.
After you’ve built your timeline of different goals, it’s time to build in cues to help assist with your adherence. Some useful cues that you could try are:
This is just one example of how you can structure cues to promote positive habits. By segmenting your goals and baking in cues that are realistic for you to follow, you can build long-term adherence toward habits you want to create.
Below, you’ll find nine habits that are great starting points to build a habit framework around if you need a little habit motivation. Start with the examples below, then build cues that make sense for the context of your life.
Breaking down your large goals into smaller, achievable steps will help you to stay on track and accomplish your 2021 resolutions. Happy New Year!
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By Jake Boly, CSCS
