Far too often, New Year's Resolutions are made more like wishes which is probably why we expect them to fail.  Make this year different and approach your health and fitness goals with a financial or business planning process in mind.  

When you plan for retirement, you start at the end and work back, making regular contributions following a strategic plan.  If you're launching a business, you don't wait until the day before to create your product or service.

The following outlines some simple versions of planning tools that can help you to turn your fitness resolutions into reality for 2015. You can use these for all levels, but we've applied each one to address the specific needs of someone starting out, occasional exercisers and fitness enthusiasts.


Getting started or restarted with your fitness?  Create a Fitness Business Plan!

  • Set Goals - Make them meaningful with a variety of measures to tell a more complete story.  In addition to weight, consider a chest, a total of chest, waist and hip, a favourite item of clothing or a strength benchmark.  You can also include subjective measures of energy and stamina by using a scale of 1-10 giving yourself a daily or weekly rating.  
  • Identify your Budget - This can help you weigh the options of working out at a club or home.  When you consider an annual membership, you may find it more feasible to purchase equipment for home.
  • Plan Activities - First, identify activities that you can enjoy.  Ideally, the plan should include a balance of cardio, muscle and flexibility training.  This section should also include a realistic schedule for both days and time.  Start out conservatively with time and intensity and gradually increase to best match your goals.  
  • Monitor - This step often gets overlooked as a priority but is important with both cardio and strength training.  When it comes to intensity, the middle ground of "comfortable but challenging" makes the most sense.  Too little won't likely get you the results you want where too much intensity can lead to increased stress, cortisol and risk of injury.
  • Review - Like with any business or project, it's important to review results and assess progress.  It also provides an opportunity to add variety and challenge on a regular basis.  

Inconsistent or an occasional exerciser?  Create a SWOT Analysis!

  • Strengths - Identify physical strengths along with areas you enjoy or master with your program including motivation, sticking to your schedule, focusing your energy, etc.
  • Weaknesses - Identify areas to improve upon.  Again, think about fitness components but also motivation, intensity, etc.
  • Opportunities - Are there areas you're not optimizing or that perhaps add to the benefits or motivation with your workouts.  Can you combine social time, make use of down time while waiting for kids' activities, workout closer to work to wait out traffic, etc.
  • Threats/Challenges - What are the biggest barriers you face keeping consistent?  Motivation, time, distance to the gym, family pressures?

Once you see all of this information in print, it's easier to identify strategies and options for addressing the barriers that have been preventing you from optimizing your time and results.


Fitness enthusiast striving for more?  Do a GAP Analysis!

Although the simplest chart, this can be the most challenging to tackle.  As you get closer to your goal, more effort and energy will be required to drive change.  It will also require paying closer attention to related areas including nutrition, supplements and sleep.

  • Current fitness level - Identify specific measures and benchmarks for your current fitness goal.  Use a variety of measures, like with the business plan, that will provide and broader picture..
  • Optimal fitness form - Use the same measures to identify your ultimate fitness level.  From there you can identify the discrepancy between the two and start to work on a strategy to get from point A to point B.

Taking the time to write out your goals and plans will automatically increase your chance of success.  It will also provide you with the benchmarks and measures that are necessary to ensure you are spending your fitness time and energy wisely.

Find the fitness business plan, GAP and SWOT analyses to help you set your 2015 goals on the Canada AM section of www.libbynorris.com.

If you have a specific question we'd love to hear from you.  We also have a quick survey to find out your biggest challenges to help plan workouts and segments for the New Year!