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Turn Your New Year’s Resolutions Into Real Achievements

By Gaelle Abecassis | Jan 5, 2024

If you’re like most folks, your New Year resolution to go to the gym three times a week, drop 10 pounds, train for a spring 10k run, or crush an early summer triathlon will crumble by Valentine’s Day. The problem is that these New Year's resolution ideas are often vague. Consider the “New Year, New Me!” mantra as an example of the worst. Sure, we lay out the goal (an important step!), but we don’t think too hard about the plan to get there. And then, sure enough, motivation peters out, or something else comes up that detour sabotages your fitness journey. Sooner than later, you give up and shelve that resolution until next year.

But in 2024, we’re not going to let that happen. This year, we’re going to make SMART fitness goals. In this case, SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-Bound, the five elements of a successful training program. Humango’s AI coaching app will help guide us through the beginning, progression, and finish line. With SMART goal-setting, we’ll turn our resolutions into successful achievements. 

Specific

The more specific the goal, the clearer it becomes in our minds. So instead of saying, “I want to bike a 100k century this year,” say, “I want to ride the Tour de Big Bear Gran Fondo on August 3rd.” This step sets a deadline to reach the goal, defines a location where it will occur, and adds some details to the type of training required (long, sustained climbs and descents to handle the mountainous course). With Humango’s help, we can plug in the event date and the training plan needed (gran fondo), and voilá, we end up with a detailed plan starting on January 1st and ending with the race on August 3rd.

Measurable

Logging and charting our progress is crucial to sticking to any resolution. Thankfully, training for endurance sports such as running, cycling, or triathlons provides tons of measurable data. Mileage, speed, heart rate, and watts are the big ones. The more we log, the more we see the positive progression in our fitness. This visualization generates a positive feedback loop that propels us to maintain our training momentum and keep that positive data flowing. Humango’s dashboard makes it easier and more rewarding than ever to chart and see that growth.

Achievable

For the sake of the “SMART” acronym, Achievable comes third here, but it should sit second on this hierarchy. It’s one thing to define a specific resolution. It’s another to pick one with a high probability of success rather than frustrating failure. With Humango’s help, we can see what is realistically possible given the constraints of real life and our current fitness level. For example, maybe we want to ride the 150-mile Steamboat Gravel Gran Fondo on August 18th. But after entering that goal, we realize we can’t commit the training time needed to pull it off. So, we recalibrate our resolution and shoot for the shorter 70-mile Tour de Big Bear event. Of course, the opposite can be true, as well. We may think we can only pull off the 70-miler, but a quick check with Humango may show us that the 150-mile race is, in fact, very doable.

Realistic

Realistic feeds off Achievable. We want to build our New Year’s resolutions around activities we can either do already or develop quickly. For example, we may dream of finishing a full iron-distance triathlon next year, but if we have no history of doing laps in a pool, it may be a stretch to think we can swim more than two miles at the race (plus biking 112 miles and running a marathon). In this case, being realistic means being honest with ourselves about where we are on our fitness journey and adapting our resolutions accordingly. The key to success is starting where we are — not where we wish we were. 

Time-Bound

We touched on Time-Bound in our discussion of Specific. Simply, it’s assigning a defined deadline to our goals and resolutions. Once we do this, we can work backward to the present and build a training schedule and program that takes us step-by-step to our resolution’s deadline. Humango makes this step easy. All we have to do is plug in the goal date; Hugo, Humango’s AI-powered digital coach, does the rest.

Done right, this SMART approach to setting health and fitness resolutions for the New Year should make 2024 our best year yet.