It’s the middle of February and freezing temperatures have plagued Duluth the past week.

Christmas break is over. The second semester of the school year has begun, but there’s nothing you want to do more than sit in your cozy bed and sleep.

The buzzing of your alarm clock awakens you. It’s another early morning that you promised yourself you’d get up for. You made this promise before 2023 began.

It's a promise that many people make at the start of the new year: a New Year’s resolution to take up the habit of working out.

You feel the want to fulfill this promise, but you also desire to fall back asleep.

You want to improve your physical and mental health by hitting the gym, but you’ve scarcely been to the gym this year and are completely lost on where to start.

Well there’s good news for you because you don’t have to look any further for motivation or a plan to get started.

Here's a warm welcome to a step-by-step guide on how to get in the gym consistently and crush your resolution.

STEP 1: Figure out what your specific goals for exercising are and write them down

This step may seem boring and cliché, but it is also the most crucial — that’s why it is step one. Don’t skip this step!

Ask yourself what you want to get out of working out. This could be things such as stress relief or wanting to fulfill the potential your body has.

Next write your answer to this question down in the form of a specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound (SMART) goal.

“Vividly describing your goals in written form is strongly associated with goal success, and people who very vividly describe or picture their goals are anywhere from 1.2 to 1.4 times more likely to successfully accomplish their goals than people who don’t,” Mark Murphy, a senior contributor for Forbes.com, said. 

That means people who write down their goals have a 20% to 40% better chance of achieving those set goals. 

Setting goals for yourself is important because the way you structure your workouts is based on your goals,” Josh Livingston, a college strength and conditioning coach, said. 

How will you know what the best way to produce results in your workouts is if you don’t know what you want your results to look like?

For more information on how to write a SMART goal, check out this Atlassian article.

STEP 2: Find a friend to do it with you

There are days where you won’t feel like working out. Therefore, it's good to have someone who can hold you accountable.

If you know someone with the same fitness goals as you or has more experience working out than you, go to the gym with them.

This is an optional step, but is highly recommended. “Get someone to do it with you,” John DeVries, a sophomore at UMD who began working out the summer before his freshman year, said.

It wasn't until DeVries started going with one of his buddies that he started to develop a solid routine in the gym. “It’s way better when you have someone pushing you and holding you accountable to go,” DeVries said.

Another bonus of going with a friend is that they can monitor your form as you do the exercises.

“Good form is better than lifting a lot of weight,” DeVries said.

Practicing good form is something that both DeVries and Livingston have learned in their experiences weightlifting and stressed the importance of it.

“Movement over maxes,” Livingston said. “No matter if you’ve just started out or lifted for twenty years.”

STEP 3: Create a schedule and workout plan to commit to 

Once you have your goal(s) and possibly a friend to workout with, all that’s left is to get to it!

Plan your week ahead of time so you can build in set times for you to workout.

If you don’t know what exercises or equipment to use, Livingston recommends starting with heel-elevated goblet squats, goblet sumo deadlift and push-ups.

 These are recommended because they are good basic lifts that can prepare someone for the main compound lifts that utilize barbells like squat, deadlift and bench.

“Your body is a machine, your brain is the computer,” Livingston said. “Whatever you tell it to do, it’ll do.”

Updated 2/13/2023