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Sports Backers Blog

Make Your Resolution a Habit in 2015

by Jon Lugbill

This is the time of year when many of us make a New Year’s resolution to do something better in our lives in 2015. I’ve witnessed the increased number of people visiting the YMCA the first month of the year. Unfortunately, by February, the number of people at visiting the YMCA calms down and returns to normal.

Magazines are full of great advice on how to keep your New Year’s Resolutions, and I recently read an article about just that online. These articles are even popping up in our local media, like Maria Howard’s great article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. She offers tips for making your resolutions stick, among which include being realistic, starting small and building, picking something you enjoy, and doing it with a buddy. This makes lots of sense. All of these articles make me wonder why, if everyone is reading these tips and making New Year’s Resolutions, do so many people not keep their fitness goals each year?

Seeking a better understanding of this contradiction, I dove much deeper into this phenomenon and read “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg. He uses a mixture of stories and clinical studies to explain why we have habits and where they are saved in our brains. I found the book fascinating. The review in the New York Times provides a nice overview, but if you read the full book, you’ll find an explanation of the essential details on why habits are so hard to create and break.

As we all know, habits are things we do without even thinking about them.  When we walk down stairs we are not thinking, “okay, I need to put one foot in front of the other and lower it down and place it on the next step”. Our mind automatically knows what to do, and we don’t have to even think about it to walk down the stairs. How does this happen and what does it have to do with New Year’s resolutions?

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We try to make it fun and easy for you to commit to being more active, but, ultimately, including physical activity in your day is up to you! A great way to make exercise a habit is by committing to participate in events like the Ukrop’s Monument Avenue 10k!

The reason New Year’s resolutions are so hard to keep is they have to become habit in order to stick. If you are in the habit of sleeping in every morning, it is hard to break the habit and get up early to go exercise. Duhigg explains in his book that it takes approximately 140 to 150 times of repeatedly doing something for it to become a habit. If you have to create a habit, you can’t do it quickly and easily.  It takes time and consistency. This is the same for breaking bad habits as well as creating good habits.

Duhigg further explains that to break a bad habit, you have to be conscience of what your habit is and what cue makes you continue that habit. You then need to develop an alternative action for that cue and act on it.

How does this translate into fitness? You need to find out what cue in your subconscious is keeping you from getting out the door to go and workout. No matter how busy we are, we all have 30 minutes in our day where we are watching TV, scanning Facebook, or surfing the internet that could be replaced with working out.  What is the cue in your brain that says it is time to do those activities? Can it be replaced with a cue to get up and workout?

I have made a list of habits I would like to change and have found out what the cues are that I automatically respond to. I have also developed alternative actions for those cues. For example, I have a habit of grabbing something to eat as I’m running out the door of my house. I grab a hand full of nuts, some cereal or crackers.  I’m not hungry or in need of calories, I’m just responding to a habit. I have replaced that habit with the idea that I will grab something to eat at my destination if I’m still hungry. Of course, I almost never am actually hungry once I leave the house. I’m just hungry out of habit!

Of course, here at Sports Backers, we are trying to motivate and encourage a healthy lifestyle by promoting physical activity. We try to make fitness fun and accessible to people throughout the region by having celebratory events like the Ukrop’s Monument Avenue 10k. No matter how much fun our events are though, the choice to be active ultimately comes down to individuals changing their personal habits. This 2015, we invite you to join us, and make this next year your most active yet!

 

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