How to Reach Your Wellness Goals This Year
What would it take to make 2024 your year?
It’s a very personal question—and no two people will answer it the exact same way. Even still, there are probably many of us with some goals in common.
Of all the New Year’s resolutions you’ll hear this year, there’s a good chance that many will centre around wellness. But what exactly does it mean to work on wellness, and how do you transform such a big-picture goal into tangible steps that you can actually act on?
In this guide, we’ll go over a few tips to help you set, progress, and ultimately reach your wellness goals in 2024, helping to make it a year of feeling better than ever.
What is Wellness?
The idea of wellness can be very personal, and it’s up to you to decide what it means for you in 2024 and beyond. With that said, there are a few main categories of wellness that your goals might fit into. Here are a few broad strokes ideas to help you narrow down your unique wellness goals in the new year:
Working on mental health through self-care and mindfulness
Losing weight by getting involved in a sport
Getting stronger by training in the gym or at home
Improving cardio with consistent exercise, such as running, cycling, or swimming
Getting proactive about treating pain and improving mobility with the help of an expert
Whatever wellness means to you, it’s within your reach. All it takes is to refine your goal into a step-by-step list of achievable milestones and keep up with some best practices to keep yourself on track. Let’s have a look.
Setting Wellness Goals
Before you can begin, you’ll need to set yourself a goal to work towards. When you come up with the goal(s) for you, it’s important to set yourself up for success. What does this mean? The SMART goal framework is a good rule of thumb to apply:
Specific – The clearer the goal, the easier it will be to attain. For example, setting the goal of ‘being healthier’ won’t do you as much good as the goal of ‘spending 80 minutes running per week’.
Measurable – A good goal is something that can be tangibly tracked. This lets you measure and truly feel your progress, which can be a big help with motivation. Plus, making your goal tangible lets you know when you’re done! An example of a measurable goal would be ‘learn to touch my toes by the end of the year’ versus ‘become more flexible.’
Attainable – When planning wellness goals, it’s important to balance realism and challenge. You want to push yourself, but your goal needs to be possible. If you’re dealing with ongoing pain or stiffness, an attainable but challenging goal might be to ‘do a 20-minute stretching routine every day.’
Relevant – Why is this goal significant? What will reaching it help you achieve? Will the work it takes to accomplish your goal be worth it? This question helps you invest your energy wisely and keep yourself on the right track.
Time-Bound – This essentially refers to setting yourself a deadline. Setting a timeline will help you stay on track with your goal, providing urgency and motivation to complete it.
With your SMART goal set, the next step is to embark on achieving it!
Working Towards Wellness Goals
Depending on the nature of your goal, the exact steps you’ll need to take will vary greatly. However, a few key principles (along with some discipline and hard work on your part) will help guide you towards the wellness you deserve.
1. Break It Down
Even the biggest, most ambitious goals begin with just a single step. When you’ve got your wellness goal in mind, break it down into its smallest pieces. If your goal is to restore a full range of motion in your shoulder, the roadmap to success might look like this:
Get a professional diagnosis
Keep up with regular visits with an expert
Stay disciplined about at-home stretches
Exercise the area at least three times per week
Commit to rest when necessary
When you break it down like this, a big goal suddenly feels a lot more manageable, allowing you to tackle it step-by-step.
2. Celebrate the Little Milestones
Don’t deprive yourself of the feeling of success until the very end of your goal! Remember to take a moment whenever you make progress toward your goal.
For example, if your goal is to get through a day at work without back pain, you should also take a moment to celebrate when you can make it to lunchtime! Taking time to recognize these little milestones can be a huge help for your motivation.
3. Forgive Yourself for Hiccups
Nobody’s perfect, and keeping up with wellness goals can be a big challenge. Let’s say your goal is to get stronger by going to the gym four days a week. Perhaps one week, you feel tired or a little under the weather, and only make it in for one day. It’s all too easy to let this slip-up get the best of you, enter the thought pattern of ‘why bother’ and fall out of the habit entirely.
But if you can allow yourself some forgiveness, you can let go of these limiting thoughts. Remember—you made it into the gym for one day! You’ve already improved so much, and a few missed days won’t matter as long as you keep at it. Do your best to adjust your mindset around slip-ups and hiccups. Shake it off, keep your eyes on the prize, and persist toward your goal.
4. Track Your Progress
Another great way to stay on track with your wellness goal is through some kind of tracking. For health-related goals, this can be done with technology, such as a Fitbit, Apple Watch, or your phone’s health app to track goals like ‘getting 80,000 steps a week’ or ‘getting my heart rate up once per day.’
Even if you don’t use a gadget to help, you can still track your progress the old-fashioned way in a document or on paper. This is a great way to measure improvement, such as tracking your personal best for strength training or cardio endurance. When things are feeling tough, you can take a look back and see how far you’ve come.
5. Get Support and Accountability
Finally, one of the best ways to make sure you reach your goals is with a little support and accountability from others. This can take all kinds of forms—perhaps it’s updating your partner when you reach your weekly mini-goals. Maybe it’s a gym buddy who will notice if you don’t make it for your workout. Perhaps it’s a friend who plays the same sport as you and supports your progress. In any case, having someone else with an interest in your goal can do wonders for helping you achieve it.
If you’re looking for expert support with your wellness goals in 2024, another great option is to work with professionals. At Triumph Physio & Wellness, we’ve had the privilege to help countless clients set, work at, adapt, and ultimately achieve their wellness goals. From mobility to strength, weight loss to overall health, we know how to break down your wellness dreams into a roadmap of tangible, attainable steps.
Book a consultation with us today if you'd like to reach your wellness goals triumphantly this year! We're here to help you do that!
Creative Commons Attribution: Permission is granted to repost this article in its entirety with credit to Triumph Physio and Wellness and a clickable link back to this page.