Detox Your Fitness: January

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!