Avoid the Risk of Burning Out the First Week of Your Fitness Plan

While simply starting is the first challenge of changing unhealthy lifestyle habits, getting through the first week of a new fitness plan can be tough, too.

Avoid Burnout the First Week of a New Fitness Plan image courtesy of Pixabay

There are, however, things you can do to make that first week go more smoothly and to keep yourself inspired when things feel a little too hard.

Avoid the Risk of Burning Out the First Week of Your Fitness Plan

Build success into your fitness plan. When you experience success, it feels amazing, and you want more, and success doesn't have to be huge, it can be something as small as checking off eight boxes to show you drank eight glasses of water.

• It can be drawing a smiley face on your calendar after your workout, even if it's just a five minute workout - because you did it! 
• We get so used to doing everything for others, doing even a small thing for ourselves can be counted as  victory, and you know what? It should be!

Know yourself. If, for example, you know sore muscles will make you quit, avoid the intense workouts that give you sore muscles the first week.

• Instead, do something else that gives you results you can feel good about, and plan to start intense workouts later. 
• I'm starting this out by incorporating different exercises and sharing information about them, and the science behind why I have chosen these particular exercises, how they feel when I do them, and why it's okay -and even safer - if I don't jump right into high intensity workouts. 
• Every day that I get through and write about it in the hope it can help someone else - that's my victory.
• I'll add information on nutrition and harder exercises later, but this is where I am today, and that's okay, just like it's okay for you.

Be flexible. When you are starting a new workout routine or fitness plan of any kind, you don't know what you are going to feel from day to day or moment to moment, so you need to give yourself permission to be flexible.

• Don't make your new plan so rigid that if you can't perfectly do 10 push-ups, it's over and you consider it a failure. 
• Adapt and make a plan to GET to where you can do those ten push-ups. 
• If you're focusing on dietary changes first, don't make your diet so strict that a few extra bites of something yummy or comforting means you've failed.
• Again... build success into your new fitness plan by allowing for your humanity, and by being flexible, so a small blunder or need to make a change is not a failure, it's just... like your GPS might say... recalculating - it doesn't change your destination, it just changes the route you take to get there a bit. 

Why the First Week of a New Fitness Plan Is So Critical

The first week of a new fitness routine is so critical because emotions get tied up in the first week's success or failure, and if it feels like a failure, that failure can turn into another ten or fifty pounds and a whole new batch of health problems.

So, if you haven't started yet, what are you going to do for yourself first? Feel free to leave a comment if you need support or just want to share your own ideas on getting started.Laure J