We are coming to that point in the year when a lot of people who have made New Year’s resolutions begin to think about giving up, especially those around fitness. Local personal trainer and fitness expert Chris Wardlow shared his thoughts about motivation, New Year’s resolutions and the best ways to make a start to living a healthier, fitter life.

What keeps you motivated to maintain your level of fitness and keep exercising?

For me personally at the moment, age. Staying healthy, being able to move, being able to take the dog out, making sure I can drive around and walk around until when I’m older and stay as healthy as possible as I get older. That really is the motivation now, it’s not about competition, it’s definitely not about ego anymore. It’s about hanging on in there, having those nails on the blackboard and as you get older just scraping down and trying to hang on for as long as you can. So mainly it’s about staying healthy, I’m 56 now and things have changed a lot over the years, even since a year ago, when I was motivated to win the British number one in the CrossFit Open but since then it’s completely changed from one of competition to just staying healthy.

British Military Fitness have found that 68% of Brits make a New Year’s resolution to get fit, 1/3 of them make a start and the majority give up by February. What are your thoughts on this and how does it affect your business? 

I am really surprised that BMF have found that 1/3 of people do something about it because at the start of the year at CrossFit in all the classes we put up everyone’s fitness goals and I gave them a question last week. “How many of you have done something about it?” And only about 20% had actually done anything about it. So for me New Year’s resolutions are good for the industry in regards to marketing, selling you something you don’t need, personally I don’t think it has a massive impact on my business. Because everyone knows you make a New Year’s resolution and you never keep it, ever and I don’t even make them anymore. What I’m trying to get to here is how do we make those stick and it’s simple really. You’ve got to make a really really simple goal that is achievable, not something like “I’m going to deadlift 200 kilos even though at the moment I can only deadlift 100.” Because that’s not feasible. So in short, get a goal, make it measurable, make it really achievable, have it within a certain timeframe and start slow.

What is the most important piece of advice you could give to someone trying to get fitter and start that journey?

Start. Stop talking about it, just get in there and get started and take your time, it takes a long, long time. You just have to commit to it, so get started, be consistent and make sure what you’re doing is achievable. Don’t say “I’m gonna go 5 times a week” if it isn’t going to happen and it will put you off. There is a phrase that we use which says “get out of breath once every day” which is quite a nice one to use because you can do that in any way. That’s my main piece of advice.

 

 

Chris is co-founder and coach at Mint Coaching:

https://www.mintcoaching.fit