Making good New Year’s Resolutions

The first half of the holiday season has passed. From reports from friends trips to any store or the outlet malls two days before Christmas was a matter of survival of the fittest. Next up is the New Year’s Celebration. It is the start of a New Year and for many that follow the tradition of making New Year Resolutions it is a chance to start trying to correct some bad habits and start over again.

It seems most resolutions are about health and fitness practices. This is a wide range of choices for this category. The more serious resolutions about health are usually trying to quit smoking or drinking to excess. These are good resolutions to make as health concerns and can have major consequences if continued. Both are very tough habits to quit and it takes a major effort to make them stick. Both have programs to help a person make the resolution work. Some programs involve either medication or a person to guide the person with these resolutions.

The other topic for resolutions involve the area of fitness. This can be a resolution to lose weight next year. This is one of the resolutions I make every year. So far after about five years I have lost 5 pounds of the 15 I wanted to lose with my resolutions. I try to blame it on the older age of your body slowing down the metabolism and that is why the weight is so hard to lose. In younger years I went from 175 in football to 157 in wrestling in a month. Now going from 180 to 175 means almost starving myself. The main ingredient I am missing from those younger years is moving and exercise. I had a compulsion to exercise every day. Depending on the circumstances of the working day the exercise schedule ranged from very early morning (6:00 a.m. or earlier) to late evening (11:00 p.m.). Being retired I can set my schedule to exercise for any hour of the day. In those younger years (any year under 70 counts) I put a workout as the #1 priority for the day. Now I find too many excuses to not exercise. Exercise in the younger years was a minimum of an hour of intense running or lifting weights. Now I can get a moderate workout in 30 minutes and it seems harder to find that half hour than the two hours years ago. This is what makes keeping New Year’s Resolutions so hard to keep.

The key to keeping a resolution is the term called ‘motivation’. It comes down to just how motivated are you to make that resolution and then proceed to follow through with the effort to make the resolution complete. A little complexity in the word motivation is what exactly is motivation? I recall runners making a marathon as a resolution. They would tell other people so that now that would increase the motivation to run a marathon. I would tell them that running a marathon is a very individual thing and that they needed to run the marathon for themselves and not some other person. My “marathon” is to enter a 5K race again this year and bring the finish time down about 10 minutes. The last time I wanted to walk the distance was under one hour. This year the goal is to be closer to 45 minutes. I have about four months to do this resolution. That means I need to start walking more. After walking more I need to walk even more and add some hills to the effort. Then within those walking distances I need to put in some jogging. And to take 15 minutes off my previous time that means the jogging distance has to be a lot farther than last time. I am not sure if my jogging will be on the uphill sections of my walk but for every uphill there has to be a downhill along the way and that is easier.

The second part of my resolution is to increase my strength. I keep reading how each decade you age the muscle mass decreases and senior citizens get weaker. And the result is losing strength to regain your balance if you trip over something. And lifting things that were very easy for you some years ago are now considered heavy. I won’t try for any really heavy lifting like in my younger years. In my mid-20’s I could lift 300 pounds over my head and in my late 50’s I was still squatting over 400 pounds. After many years of taking it easy I need to understand I am no longer that ‘spring chicken’ and starting over a little slower is necessary. A friend in the rehabilitation area said that the increase in people over 60 years old are the pickleball players. Her clientele has seen a big increase in these senior citizen athletes trying to get fit and have fun doing it. The key is to know that muscles are weaker and less flexible now.