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Supplement Articles – by Brandon Verde

New Year's Resolution Guide

  New Year, New Me… something along those lines, right? While New Year’s Resolutions are a step in the right direction, often they lack the specificity and strategy to go from resolution to reality. Fortunately, we’ve got the perfect tool to help… introducing our New Year’s Fitness Resolution Guide! If taking your fitness to the next level is one of your new year resolutions, let us help you turn that resolution into a solid goal and turn that goal into an accomplishment that you can look back on at the end of the year and be super proud of! The first, and arguably most important step in turning your New Year’s Fitness Resolutions into reality, is to make sure you’re setting goals that are set-up to be achieved. Here’s a simple 5 step goal setting strategy to make it happen! Step 1: Revisit (or define if you haven't already) your "Why". Why are you setting a fitness goal in the first place? Why are you motivated to improve your health & fitness? For most of us this is going to involve the people we care about and the positive impact we can have on them. Step 2: Determine what you want to achieve with your fitness. Be bold. Be ambitious. But be concise too. Keep it to 1 or 2 major fitness goals for the year. Step 3: Break down your bold & ambitious fitness goals into S.M.A.R.T. goals; Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant & Time Bound.  Specific: Each goal needs to be specific enough to describe exactly what you want to achieve. Try and quantify your goal if possible (for example, I want to weigh XX kg, or I want to be able to bench press XX kg)  Measurable: Each goal needs to be quantifiable and measurable. If it’s not measurable and specific, you’ll never know what you’re aiming for and whether or not you have achieved it. Achievable: Each goal needs to be attainable & realistically achievable based on your current circumstances and resources. There is no point setting a goal so far-fetched that you know right from the start that you won’t be able to achieve it. Relevant: Your goal needs to be relevant & important to you. You need to have a desire and passion to achieve your goal for it to be relevant to you as an individual. This ties back into your “Why”. Ask yourself why setting a particular goal is important to you in the first place to ensure it is relevant. Time Bound: A goal without a deadline is not a goal at all, it is a dream. You need to carefully pick a realistic time frame for you to work towards achieving each fitness goal. Step 4: Create a daily accountability calendar. Buy yourself a daily diary and write down 3 specific actionable tasks that are within your realm of control (but outside of your comfort zone or habitual routines) that elate to your S.M.A.R.T. goals at the start of every single day. Perhaps they might be: Workout With Weights For 60 Minutes Consume Daily Macros  Drink 2L Water As you complete the tasks throughout the day, cross them off the list. Try and get every single task done every single day. Win the day. Stack those days to win the week. Stack those weeks to win the month. Stack those months to win the year. Step 5: Reflect on your progress. Self-reflection is one of the best techniques you can implement to maintain accountability, keep yourself motivated, and keep yourself on track. It is something you will get a lot of value out of doing on a weekly basis. Find 5 - 10 minutes that you can commit to at the start (or end) of every week to go through the past 7 days and reflect on your efforts using the following checklist: If you are not scoring either an 8, 9 or 10 across every part of this checklist you need to ask yourself why, and more importantly, what are you going to change in the coming week to score 8 or higher? Want more strategic advice on how to set goals that are set-up to be achieved? Check out this episode of the Fitness x Business Podcast “5 Step New Year Goal Setting Methodology” at the link below: It’s one thing to set goals, it’s a-whole-nother thing to reset daily habits & routines to ensure they align with your goals. But here’s the catch with bad habits; you can’t just stop them. They need to be replaced with new habits that align with your new goals. Here’s 3 new habits that you’ll want to incorporate into your daily routine: Replace eating when you’re hungry and eating until you’re full with tracking your daily food intake. Free apps like My Fitness Pal or CalorieKing are super easy to use and a great way to track your daily food intake. Replace ignoring your progress (or lack thereof) with taking a progress photo every morning.  You may want to weigh yourself every morning instead if you prefer numbers over photos. The key is to make sure you are tracking your progress daily.  Replace being chronically dehydrated with drinking 2 litres of water every day. Get yourself an MJ Bro Jug, fill it up at the start of every day and make sure it’s empty by the end. Want more strategic advice on how to replace old bad habits with new good ones? Check out this episode of the Fitness x Business Podcast “5 New Habits For The New Year” at the link below: A well structured workout plan tailored to your lifestyle is an absolute necessity for achieving your fitness goals. Which is why we created our Free Workout Plan. Simply select your goal, your gender, and your training experience and we will provide you with a structured workout program designed to help you reach your fitness goals. And because we know that a structured workout program is only part of the holistic fitness equation, we will also provide you with a guide on cardio and how to track your progress to ensure you stay on track. Give our Free Workout Plan a go at the link below. Falling off track is common, after all, we are only human. What is most important is not dwelling on what you did to fall off track, but instead identifying where you lost your way, what you can do differently to ensure it doesn’t happen again, and focusing on how quickly you can pick yourself up, dust yourself off and get back into the swing of things.  Say you don’t go to the gym for a day because you were too tired, then the next day something happens at work and you have to stay late… another session missed. There is no point dwelling on the fact you missed two workouts, tomorrow is a new day, and a new opportunity to get yourself back on track and working towards your goals. Say you’ve snoozed your alarm to wake up for morning cardio for the past 5 days and haven’t done any of your cardio because you’ve been too exhausted to get up. You clearly need your rest as it is an important factor for progress so perhaps aim to get to sleep earlier so that you can get sufficient sleep and are still able to wake up early enough for morning cardio. Perhaps it’s late, you’re tired, you’re all out of prepared meals and you can’t be bothered cooking something up, so you head to the pantry or the fridge. Next morning you wake up after passing out from a food coma only to realise that last night you consumed your entire day of calories in 30 minutes and all the food you ate was just different shades of brown (chips, chocolate, ice cream & biscuits) with no recollection of how it all happened. It’s OK… it happens to the best of us from time to time. You forgot to take your creatine for a day or two or you haven't hit your daily protein target this week. It's very easy to just give up and leave those supps sitting in the back of your pantry until your next wave of motivation hits. Missing a day or two is not the end of the world. The most important thing to realise is that there is nothing you can do to go back and change it, and the best thing you can do is move on. Don’t cut your calories for the new day, don’t skip meals, don’t do extra cardio, don't double up on your creatine, don’t starve yourself; just pick yourself up and get right back on track from the minute you wake up. Use the experience as a lesson to be as prepared as you can be with your meals for when you feel like this again. In any situation, identify the reason for falling off track, and then work out what you need to do differently moving forward to stay on track. And there you have it – everything you need to dive into your New Year’s Fitness Resolution head first! And while there is more than enough info here to ensure you are set up for success, if you are looking for more guidance, more accountability, and more support, be sure to join us for Season 13 of the MJ Challenge; our bi-annual 10 week transformation challenge. Hit the link below to learn more! Season 13 is scheduled to start February 2025 and it’s going to be our biggest challenge ever! In the meantime, join our exclusive MJ Fitness Facebook Group and feel free to ask any questions you may have and get immediate responses from the super supportive MJ community.