You have the best of intentions and you are really excited to start your new workout routine but sometimes life gets in the way. You had an emergency at work today or something else unexpected popped up which left no time for you to squeeze in your workout. Now, you are feeling guilty and this feeling has seriously killed your motivation for your new workout routine. Those familiar phrases “I’ll start again tomorrow” or “I’ll start again on Monday” start to run through your head and you use that as a way to make yourself feel better and let go of the guilt. While it is good to not let yourself feel too guilty or beat yourself up over a missed workout, it is also important to not let yourself make excuses because you may never reach your goals if you keep starting over tomorrow.

Today is the day you need to stand up for yourself and what you want. Right now, take out a piece of paper and write out your top three health and fitness goals. Now, we want you to look these goals over and for each one write down one reason why reaching those goals are important to you and how you’ll feel once you reach them. The next step is to post this piece of paper somewhere you will look at it every single day. You need to make sure you take a couple minutes each day to read over these goals and the feelings associated with reaching them. Then visualize yourself once you’ve reached these goals and allow yourself to feel the feelings associated with having achieved them. This is one of the best processes we’ve discovered for us to reach our goals. This is something that works not only for health and fitness goals but for anything you want to achieve. Visualization is a very powerful thing.

Now, the focus of this article is making your health and fitness goals and sticking to them. Once you’ve taken the time to write out your goals, we want you to think about the how. How are you going to begin eating healthier? Maybe you should make a point to throw out all of your junk food and head over to the grocery store right now and buy the right foods that are going to get you where you want to be. If one of your goals is to stick to a new fitness plan what are you going to do to make sure you do that? Try writing your workout down in your day planner or on your calendar, schedule a time to workout and make it a priority like an appointment. Taking care of yourself is the most important thing you can do, without taking care of yourself you can’t get anything else done the way it needs to be.

We’ll leave you with a few more tips to help you stick to your workouts:

Try finding a workout buddy, you may be willing to cancel on yourself but it’ll be a lot harder for you to cancel a workout if you have to let someone else down as well. Try hiring a personal trainer, that way it really is a scheduled appointment and since you’re paying them you will be a lot more likely to “get your money’s worth” and push yourself harder than you might on your own (having a personal trainer there will ensure you do so safely). Another thing to try is start regularly attending fitness classes, not only are they fun but they will be like having an actual appointment since they run at specific times. Who knows, you may meet your new best friend in zumba class and find a great workout buddy!