EUGENIZATION.

Happy New Year everyone!

So what are your New Year’s resolutions? Better yet, will this be the year you actually achieve the goals you set for yourself in the wake of an alcohol and all-night-partying binge?

Sadly, most of the resolutions made today will be long forgotten come February.

As cliche as it might be, the act of making New Year’s resolutions might be the second most important thing you do to insure you achieve your dreams.Without clear goals (i.e., resolutions), you set yourself up for failure. Without a clear goal in mind, there’s nothing stopping you from indulging yourself with a beer or a piece of chocolate or skipping workouts when you just don’t feel like it. There’s no compelling reason for you not to; no higher standard that you need to hold yourself to. My friend Mike Collins mused about the importance of having clearly-defined goals in this process:

“It’s (A clearly-defined goal) like a road map with specific directions. This is important because during the journey, sometimes we get off track. Binging on the diet or missing workouts can lead to frustration. A frustrated state will cloud your decision making process, and you make some decisions that take you away from your goals. The reason for having the goals + how to get there in writing, before you start your journey is that you can compare where you’re going with where you should be going. From there, you can adjust.”

If the act of setting goals (making resolutions) is the second most important thing you can do to ensure you’ll achieve your fitness (and other) dreams, then what’s the most important thing?

The most important thing, of course, is to act on your resolutions - every single day.

Here are some strategies that can help you stick to your guns when the workouts become grueling and the carbs come a callin’:

1. Create small “global changes” in your lifestyle.
Although I’ve seen the biggest improvements in folks who’ve completely overhauled their lifestyles, understanding that little changes add up is another strong method to creating lasting physical change. You may not realize the impact one or two small changes in your life may have.

For example, making the switch from drinking calorie-containing (i.e., sodas, alcohol) to calorie-free (plain or bubbly water) beverages may be all the change you can handle. But doing just this one thing will reduce your daily caloric intake, reduce your hunger, and greatly reduce your insulin load. Small behavioral change, huge “global” impact. Just one or two of these types of small but far-reaching lifestyle changes can make a tremendous difference.

2. Separate your performance from your outcome.
Continue taking action, even if you screw up once in awhile. Just because you slip up on your diet once or twice or miss a workout from time to time doesn’t mean you will ultimately fail in your journey. Psychologist John Eliot puts it best:

The most successful entrepreneurs and athletes separate performance from outcome. Tiger Woods does not cry when he misses a put, or shanks one into the drink. Michael Jordan does not start to second-guess his shot if he air-balls one - and they’re not jumping up-and-down for every good shot either. We can’t always control the outcome, even when we have our very best performances we may still fail, but if we allow that to control us, we may give up performing altogether. Learn to separate “the performance” from “the outcome”.

Do hold yourself accountable for your actions and achievements, but don’t stop trying.

3. Reward yourself even if you’ve only achieved a small victory.
Some people try half-heartedly, but some people really work towards achieving an ultimate end. What causes these earnest people to burn out in less than 30 days of real application and efforts towards their fitness goals is lack of recognition. It’s good to have the end in sight, but if you don’t keep motivation up along the way, then you’re likely to get discouraged and quit. If you’re 30 lbs overweight and you say to yourself, “I can’t be happy unless I’ve got killer legs and ripped abs”, well, you’re making it awfully difficult to be happy! In the best case, you’ve delayed positive feedback for weeks, if not months, and for most people, that’s far too long to go without a kudos of some kind.

Instead, try setting up a short-term reward system of some kind - one that has a time frame of a week, or a day. Better yet,take a nod from tip #2 and make that reward system hinge upon your actions rather than your outcome. In other words, if you were “good” all week - you minimized your intake of grains and starches, you drank enough water, you performed all your scheduled workouts - then go ahead and “reward” yourself with a cheat meal. Point being, don’t wait too long before offering yourself positive reinforcement - lest it come too late.

Help me rescue the New Year’s Resolution from the dustbin of misused and abandoned motivational tools and help yourself get more out of your fitness program this year.

You can be positive, or you can be like Carl (there is a third alternative: you could be positive and take a Sayoc Kali class).

Best Wishes for you all in ‘08.