How often do you set New Year’s resolutions related to your health, fitness or weight loss goals, but consistently fail to achieve the results you want? Our experience with our readers and clients has shown us that fitness resolutions have less than a 5% success rate. Maybe it's because you've been approaching your workouts the same way each year. Maybe you set a goal to run a certain number of miles each month or buy the hardest workout plan or DVD and get injured or give up because it's too hard. The low success rate can be boiled down to a couple different reasons - failed resolutions range from either having hardly any plan at all or having too complex of a plan to follow through with.

Wondering what all of this detox stuff is all about?

Take a look at the concept behind our Detox Your Life Challenge here.

Let's take a simpler approach to fitness this time, shall we?

If you haven't already, you should check out our FREE 13 to Clean Challenge which basically gives you everything you need to hack your diet in 13 days. All you have to do is sign up here and you will instantly be redirected to the challenge! (Don't worry, if you have already entered your email address on our site you won't get duplicate emails!)

So, what will we be working on this month?

Last year we were fairly consistent with getting to the gym for a pretty high-intensity workout, but we weren’t great about stretching or doing yoga. So, our main focus for this month to help us detox our lives will be to do more yoga and stretching. Below are our goals:

Lift Weights 4-5 days per week
Cardio 2-3 days per week (at the end of our lifting workouts)
Hike at least once a week
Yoga at least once a week
Stretching every day for 10 minutes after waking and 10 minutes after lifting

To follow a plan (remember why we fail!), I am starting the 12-Week Run Builder today and Scott is doing the 12-Week Transformation. Yes, men can do the She Sweats workouts and, no, he doesn't need to transform, but it's just a great workout overall!

We love them because we can just pull them up from our phones at the gym or take the workout that we printed at home! I'm thinking we might need to re-brand these so they aren't
"She Sweats" anymore. Men can use these to sweat too!

Below is what the workout looks like on the phone, then we just have to scroll down to the date we are on. You can see all of our workout plans here.

Looking for ideas for your own challenge?

Are you new to working out?

If so, you should focus on getting into the routine of working out. Start simple, this could be walking for 30 minutes per day and you can work your way up to getting to the gym for 5-6 days per week. Again, the 13 to Clean Challenge is a great place for you to start! Use this time to really focus on building good habits and learning different exercises and routines.

Have you been working out for a while, but need to detox your fitness routine?

It's very important to cross train. If you are a runner, you definitely need to start incorporating things like weight training, yoga, and different forms of cardio (stair climbing, biking, swimming, etc). If you are a yoga only person, try incorporating a day or two of weight training. The more well rounded you are in your fitness routine the better off you will be!

Try one (or a few!) of these:

try a new workout routine for a week
take a yoga class at least once a week
run a 5K
incorporate one of our fitness challenges per week

Post your challenge worksheets, ideas and moral support to social media (we're under @heandsheeatclean) using the hashtag #dylchallenge and leave a comment below...we’d love to hear from you!

Need to write down your goals with pen and paper?

Good, we do too! We have a simple printable for you! You can print it in color or black and white and then just fill in whatever notes or goals you need to jot down. Get it here.

Reminder: Make sure you are signed up for the Detox Your Life Challenge emails so that you know when a new challenge is released or we have something fun to give you like a new printable!

Check out these additional resources:

Featured

30-Day Ab Fitness Challenge

Detox Your Home: April

clean-eating-meal-plan-1800-calorie-he-and-she-eat-clean-protein-fat-carbs.jpg

1,800 Calorie Clean Eating Meal Plan

#ProgressIsPerfection [3 Simple Ideas to Reach Your Goals]

detox-your-life-challenge-march-nutrition-health-food-recipes.jpg

Detox Your Nutrition: March

3 Simple Money Habits That Changed Our Life

Your Genes Cannot Change, but Your Lifestyle Can

meal-prep-tools-food-prep-best-clean-eating-protein-bars-he-and-she-eat-clean.jpg

Essential Meal Prep Tools

Top 5 Clean Eating Pantry Staples

1,500 Calorie Clean Eating Meal Plan

Detox Your Life Challenge

January 8, 2018Detox, ChallengesWhitney CarlsonComment

New Year’s resolutions...Ben Franklin once said, “be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man,” and we couldn’t agree more!

But, ohhh, New Year’s resolutions...you know the typical ones - get in shape, be more organized, create (and stick to) a budget, yada, yada yada...let’s face it, we all start the year with the best intentions to improve a category of our life and, hopefully, we hold ourselves more accountable than last year because those previous resolutions only lasted a week or, at best, a month then life hits. Seriously, we’ve all been there, right?!?!

For this very reason, New Year’s resolutions have the ability to be very punitive and end up becoming our own worst enemies. We set a general goal, never tackle it and get down on ourselves for the failure. The problem is this - we set a goal without having a real, workable plan as to how to tackle that goal (Tony Robbins says it best here). We tend to think that having the resolution will cause us to have an epiphany and maybe, just maybe, the perfect plan will fall in our lap. Seems like common sense, but this perennial lapse in proper goal setting is exactly why we never follow through with our resolution(s).

So, this year we decided that we were tired of failure and wanted to come up with a new challenge for ourselves. We spent 20-30 minutes and started writing down categories of our life that we wanted to improve and realized we had exactly 12 areas we wanted to improve. We thought, what if we just separated each general life category into its own month and came up with specific goals and a plan for those areas within each month? Think of it like New Month’s resolutions, but better!

Then, the idea for our first-ever “Detox Your Life Challenge” started to take shape.

We’re not perfect (far from it, actually), but we felt as though all our readers could benefit from the same 12 life categories we decided on. We have determined our own specific goals for each month/life category and will share those specifics as the months arrive. We’d love it if you join us in tackling those goals because everyone will benefit from attaining the same goals and we can hold each other accountable!

So, how does this work?

We were very intentional about the design of this challenge. Each month will rotate between self-centric and external categories. For example, we focus on self-improvement in January with fitness and then move to external environment improvement in February with money/personal finance. The idea here is that if you don’t meet your goals within a certain life category, you give your emotions a bit of a break the next month and get right back on track.

We also love how measurable this challenge is...if you set (and reach) one specific goal each month, come year’s end, you will have improved 12 areas of your life. If you set four specific goals each month, you’ll have improved 48 areas of your life! So, our advice is to list as many specific goals as possible for each month...even if you set 10 monthly goals and reach 25% of them, you’ll have improved 30 areas of your life….WOW!

But wait, why is this called the "Detox Your Life Challenge”? Aren’t detoxes bad for you? Well, the answer is this - resolutions come about because you feel an area of your life is toxic or not being fulfilled. When you boil it down, the lack of fulfillment is caused by a toxin - some tangible or intangible object that is getting in the way of living a fulfilled life. The goal of the challenge is to remove those toxins to help improve your life!

Ready to get started? Great, we are too!

Here’s how the challenge will work:

Download the printable Detox Your Life Challenge calendar here.
Join our email list and we’ll deliver our challenge updates so you can follow along with us, get moral support and fresh ideas to your inbox along with the specifics for each month.
Post your challenge worksheets, ideas and moral support to social media using the hashtag #dylchallenge and leave a comment below...we’d love to hear from you! We're on Instagram under @heandsheeatclean ---> tag us in your posts!
Join the facebook group “Detox Your Life Challenge” to share ideas and support others
Check back here each month as we share the new challenge and discuss our wins from the previous month!

Get a sneak peek at the monthly challenges below. Remember to check back for our goals and share yours too!

We'll come back here to update the links as we post for each month:

January - Detox Your Fitness
February - Detox Your Money
March - Detox Your Nutrition
April - Detox Your Home
May - Detox Your Body
June - Detox Your Digital Life
July - Detox Your Brain
August - Detox Your Relationships
September - Detox Your Office/Workspace
November - Detox Your Sleep
December - Detox Your Time