New Year, New Fitness Goals

Table of contents: 

Why make new fitness goals?

Why do your fitness goals matter to you?

How to stay accountable to your fitness goals

Weight loss goals and calculating your BMR

Why make new fitness goals? 

According to Finder, 3 in 4 Brits will make a New Year's resolution in 2025, around 40 million people, and 2 in 5 of those people (roughly 43%) will improve their physical health and mental well-being. 

So why should we make new fitness goals in 2025?

Well, a new year can help provide us with a clear vision to want to push the standard, improve our health and create healthy habits for the new year ahead. 

For those who exercise regularly, a new year provides a chance to map out new races and competitions, making it easier to plan and work in training blocks to help achieve those goals. For others, it may be a time to reflect on 2024, choosing 2025 as the year to get fit and active and improve their well-being.

Whatever your motives, making new fitness goals for the year ahead is the ideal way to stay consistent, productive and accountable. 

Building achievable healthy habits, whether that's adding in vitamins and minerals to fill the gaps in your diet, looking at joint support to keep your body fresh and ready to go on the hardest training days, or committing to improving your recovery, is the best way to guarantee your success! 

Why do your fitness goals matter to you? 

Resolutions are often broken within the first few weeks they are set. A good way to ensure this doesn't happen is to search for your 'why' or the main reason you want to achieve your goal.

Suppose your goal is to become fitter, healthier and happier. Whilst this is a great goal, it is generic, so it might be more difficult to stick to and hard to track your progress. 

Instead, ask yourself why you want to become fitter, healthier and happier and how you plan to achieve it. Digging deeper into the reasons behind your goals can be the perfect way to stay accountable and achieve them. 

Do you want to be fitter so you can run around with your small children or set a good example for your family members? Having clear reasons for your goals can make it easier to put a plan in place to ensure the greatest success at reaching them. 

There are many reasons why fitness is important to each of us, and by defining your motivation, whether that's weight loss, training towards a specific event, or leading a healthier, more active lifestyle, finding your 'why' will help you to stick to a plan for much longer than just the first month of a new year.

Setting fitness goals for success

Fitness goals often fail because we feel we do not have the time required to achieve them. But fitness isn't just running or going to the gym; it covers many exercises and practices that can be followed at any time that best suits you, whether at 5 am, 6 pm or midnight. 

Find the time in your schedule when you can commit to your fitness goals and align activities that best fit them and what you want to achieve to set yourself up for success. 

How to stay accountable to your fitness goals

Are you someone who sets the same goal every year without achieving it? 

Setting goals for a new year is the easy part of the journey; the difficulty is sticking to them and staying accountable. The best way to do this is to ensure your goals are achievable, setting mini-goals to guarantee results.

Your resolutions should always consider your schedule; if your goal is to go to the gym for two hours every day, you'll fail within the first month if there's no room in your day-to-day life to achieve this. Instead, start small and adjust your goals along the road to make them more challenging.

SMART goals

The best way to plan out any goal is to make it SMART:

• SPECIFIC - Set clear and concise goals, for example, "My goal is to exercise for at least half an hour a day, five days a week".
• MEASURABLE - Whatever your goal is, there should be an easy way to measure it, whether by time, distance, weight or reps.
• ATTAINABLE - Don't set yourself an ambitious goal that is out of reach. For example, planning to run all the major marathons when you haven't even run a mile before is a very ambitious goal. A more attainable goal might be to complete the NHS Couch to 5k plan and then set a larger goal once that's completed.
• RELEVANT - Does your goal align with other resolutions you may be setting yourself? For example, if a secondary goal is to save money, hiring a running coach or a personal trainer may not be useful or relevant to your other life goals.
• TIME BOUND - If you aim to complete your goal in 2025, this doesn't mean you can't break down your goal into smaller chunks. Set yourself up for success by building goals to help you go the distance. 

Staying accountable

The best way to ensure you stick to your goals is to take what motivates you and use that to keep you accountable.  

Whether training with a friend so you have another person to help you stay accountable or having a gym membership that you have to use to keep you accountable to your finances, choose whatever works for you and gives you the best chance of success. 

Here are some other ways to ensure you stick to your goals:

• Treat yourself with a small reward every time you chip off a mini goal, whether with a new piece of gym clothing or your favourite snack. 
• Focus on building healthy habits; don't be controlled by your willpower. Removing emotion from any task and simply facing it instead can be a great way to stay on track. 
• Don't compare yourself to others. Everyone is at a different stage in their fitness journey, so there's no point comparing your fitness, speed or aesthetics to anyone else in the gym. Focus on your own goals and successes. 
• Use mistakes as motivators rather than setbacks. Now and again, you may miss a training day, but that isn't an excuse to throw the towel in. Assess how far you've come and pick yourself up again to continue your journey. 
• Prepare for success. Whether that's laying your kit out the night before a morning gym session, or leaving your water bottle next to the front door, putting positive steps in place can help you to stay accountable. 

Weight loss goals and calculating your BMR

If your fitness goals centre around building bulk or losing weight, there are further steps that you can take, alongside planning out your goals, to help achieve them. 

If your goals involve working in a calorie deficit, you aim to bulk up, or you want to ensure that now you've introduced more exercise into your week, you maintain your current weight, then learning how to calculate your BMR can help.

What is BMR?

BMR, or Basal Metabolic Rate, is the minimum amount of calories your body requires daily to perform basic functions such as breathing, blood circulation and temperature regulation before factoring in movement and exercise. 

You can calculate your BMR using the Harris-Bendict formula, an equation that considers your age, gender, weight and height to help you determine how many calories your body needs daily to function. 

Harris-Benedict formula 

Here's how to calculate your BMR:

• For men: BMR = 66.5 + (13.75 × weight in kg) + (5.003 × height in cm) - (6.75 × age)
• For women: BMR = 655.1 + (9.563 × weight in kg) + (1.850 × height in cm) - (4.676 × age)

Whilst the formula gives a good estimate of the baseline calories your body needs daily to perform its basic functions, there are many other factors to consider, such as your level of activity, health conditions, metabolism and gut microbiome. 

How many calories do you need every day?

A more accurate understanding of how many calories you need every day is to work out your BMR and include this additional equation to get a better understanding of how many calories you need based on your daily exercise levels; 

• Sedentary - minimal or no exercise - multiply your BMR by 1.2
• Lightly active - Lightly, 1-3 days a week, multiply by 1.375
• Moderately active - moderately active 3-5 days a week, multiply by 1.55
• Very active - hard exercise, 6-7 days a week, multiply by 1.725
• Extra active - hard exercise, 6-7 days per week and a physical job multiply 1.9

From this, you can better understand roughly how many calories you would need to maintain, lose or gain weight. Although it doesn't give a complete picture and doesn't factor in the types of food you eat, it can help provide a baseline to build your fitness goals around. 

Eating at your BMR can aid with weight loss; however, without factoring in the calories you need to move around, this isn't sustainable and could be detrimental to your health in the long term.

Calculating your BMR, combined with movement, is a better place to start for giving you a rough idea of the number of calories you'll need to maintain, gain or reduce your current weight.

Key Takeaways 

• Coming up with new fitness goals at the start of the year can help you focus and give you a healthy and happy mindset for the year ahead.
• Set yourself up for success by finding your 'why' and setting SMART achievable goals in manageable chunks.
• Keep yourself accountable by training with a friend, monitoring your progress or rewarding yourself as you tick off your mini-goals. 
• If your goals are weight loss or gain related, calculating your BMR can give you a better picture of the amount of calories you'll need to gain, reduce or maintain.

Prepare to achieve your 2025 goals with Discount Supplements 

Whatever your fitness goals for 2025, Discount Supplements is here to help. Browse our goals pages to find all the supplements and advice you need to maximise your gains for the season ahead. From building muscle to strength and endurance, we've got you covered every step of the way!  

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