It's almost the end of January. Three weeks ago, you joined the gym, started dry January, bought new pair of trainers and more celery that our country grows.
 
Now what?

Are you still on track to achieve your goals? If so, then great!

If not, don't worry, most us fail after few weeks. We all have individual triggers that push us to behave in the way we tried not to.

Does this look familiar?
 
Trigger > unhealthy behaviour > feeling rewarded
 
For example
 
Stress at work > grabbing a cake in the cafeteria > feeling relaxed

Is breaking a bad habit easy? Unfortunately, not!

If you have certain unhealthy habits that you tried to break in the past, you are facing two glooming facts

• if you fail at changing the habits in the past, you are more likely to fail again than succeed. Unless you change the approach.
• With developed strong habits, you are less aware or pay less attention to the consequences of your behaviour and often choose to ignore information that is not in line with your current habits. This, in turn, makes it hard for you to identify the relevant triggers that lead you to demonstrate unfavourable behaviours.

 
One method that has been shown to be potentially successful in maintaining habits is vigilant monitoring, i.e. paying more attention to your behaviour and the moments where relapse is possible, combined with counter-conditioning behaviour that replaces the less healthy response with a healthier one.
 
Trigger > unhealthy behaviour > feeling rewarded

for

Trigger > recognition > Choosing specific healthy behaviour over the previous one > feeling rewarded.
 
Example 1
stress at work > grabbing cake in the cafeteria > feeling relaxed
 
for
 
stress at work > going for a walk or listening to your favourite music > feeling relaxed

Example 2
anxiety > smoking > relaxation
 
To
 
anxiety > calling a friend > relaxation
 
Breaking bad habits is hard and it is never a straight path, try to work on recognising the trigger, then choosing appropriate behavioural response, keep yourself accountable, either by writing this in your diary, telling your coaches at the gym or your friend.

7 steps to prevent self-sabotage and giving up in January, or ever.

1. Identify situations that put you at greater risk of relapse (certain social situations, shopping for food whilst hungry, not being able to get to the gym, etc)
2. Set a plan on how to cope with these situations (time management, relaxation training, confidence building, reducing barriers to activity)
3. Change the way you look at the activities you want to stick to (For example, when you are tired at the end of the work day you may expect to feel refreshed if you rest rather than exercise but end up feeling guilty, whereas the activity would likely have been invigorating)
4. Expect a relapse and plan for one, schedule alternative activities, bring fruit to work, ask your trainer to write you a programme when away, etc.
5. Minimise the feeling of guilt after a relapse, get back on the wagon.
6. Take pleasure from what you’re trying to do, remember that this is a journey of betterment and self discovery.
7. Avoid urges to relapse by blocking self-dialogues and images of the benefits of not exercising or treating yourself to high-calorie foods.

Acknowledging exercise barriers is an essential component of promoting long-term adherence to adopting exercise habits.
You got this!

​Greg

If you have been lucky enough to take part in a session at ICON, you would probably noticed a few things about our programmes.

1 - They are cool
2 - We often talk about how you can scale your efforts

Scaling effort comes from the world of RPE. Rated Perceived Exertion. We use this scale as a bench mark for our programming and while it might all seem a bit subjective it’s actually a really good measure of intensity and it allows you to make progress when you feel good and allows you to recover when you are having an off day.

Traditional strength programmes tend to follow a fairly rigid loading scheme, where you add a specific amount of weight to an exercise, in a given timeframe, and generally you can’t add more even if you felt like you could and they tend to have planned periods of recovery when you might not need them.

The beauty of using the effort based system is that it works around you. When you get to the gym feeling like a superhero you can add load/intensity and make some really good improvements in your strength and fitness and when you compare that to a traditional model it’s not, THAT different. Periods of recovery, coasting and added effort. You just get to decide for yourself when you push and when you back off.

Both models will increase your strength and fitness but when the progression model is build around you rather than forcing you to fit the model, you are more likely to enjoy training and get better results because you will be more consistent.

Consistency is a big part of why the effort based system of training works. If one day you wake up and you fell terrible and the prospect of added 5kg to a deadlift you already find hard isn’t very appealing. So you are more likely to not go. If you knew that you had to put in an 7 or 8 out of 10 it wouldn’t really matter what weight you selected and you would feel better about going to the gym and having a workout. 

Effort rating scale from 1-10 which can be applied to an exercise programme to make it possible for different people at different fitness levels can have the same quality work out. It also allows you to have a good workout when you feel good and even when you feel a bit rubbish.

We use an effort rating in all our programmes. Our programmes are set up so that you gradually increase the amount of effort you’re putting in. The best results tend to come from an effort rating of between 7-9 and that’s under the assumption that you are not compromising good exercise form.
​
Here is an example of a session and the effort rating we assign to each section. We divide the programme/menu into sections and those sections have specific effort ratings assigned to them.

So the end result of all this RPE chat is that regardless of whether you feel amazing or you feel like you have been on a seven day bender, you will still have a productive and enjoyable session. 

Try it out if you'd like www.icongym.co.uk/get-started.html