Fitness Focus

Exercise is always one of the most popular of American New Year’s resolutions. If you rang in 2025 with fitness goals, you’re far from alone.

There are some very good reasons to get started on your 2025 fitness goals. Even small amounts of physical activity can deliver big rewards in the areas of mood, sleep, and overall health. Physical Activity Guidelines from U.S. health officials says there’s overwhelming evidence of these benefits:

• For youth: Improve cognition, bone health, fitness, and heart health, and reduce the risk of depression.
• For adults: Helps prevent 8 types of cancer (bladder breast, colon, endometrium, esophagus, kidney, stomach, and lung) and reduces the risk of dementia (including Alzheimer’s disease). Reduces risk of heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, and depression. Improves bone health, physical function, and quality of life.
• For older adults: Lowers the risk of falls and injuries from falls.
• For pregnant women: Physical activity reduces the risk of postpartum depression.
• For everyone: Reduces the risk of excessive weight gain and helps people maintain a healthy weight.

But “getting in shape” is a pretty ambiguous resolution. What are you hoping to achieve?

Is your goal just to get started?

If you are just starting out, work toward meeting the American Heart Association Recommendations for Physical Activity in Adults. Current guidelines recommend at least 150 minutes a week of moderate aerobic activity or 75 minutes a week of vigorous aerobic activity (or a combination of the two), plus strength training.

Tips:

• Start slowly and build up to a moderate or vigorous intensity level.
• Get the basic equipment—well-fitting shoes, comfortable clothes.
• Create a workout schedule that works for you. Schedule time to exercise as you would any other appointment. Read or listen to a book, or watch your favorite show while walking on the treadmill or riding a stationary bike. Use your work breaks to go on short walks.
• Try high-intensity interval training by mixing short bursts (10 to 30 seconds) of high-intensity activity with recovery periods of low-intensity activity.
• If you have an injury or a medical condition, talk to your health care professional or fitness professional about a fitness program that slowly and steadily improves your range of motion, strength and endurance.

Or, is your goal something specific?

Maybe you have something specific in mind, like hiking a famous landmark, competitive weightlifting, qualifying for a tennis tournament, running a 5K race, or even a marathon. Look for support in your endeavor: a club—one that meets up regularly or in a virtual space—can provide support for when the going gets tough. Online sources might also be available to guide you to a step-by-step training plan to safely and successfully accomplishing your goal.
Is your fitness goal designed to help you lose weight? Talk with your health care professional about what you hope to achieve and what a realistic goal might be. Making good nutrition choices and consuming fewer calories, along with physical activity, will be key to losing weight, so it’s important to acknowledge that exercise is only one part of a bigger plan. The amount of activity needed to achieve a healthy weight is different for everyone, too.

Whatever the reason for your new goal, go for it! You’ve got this.

Is SMART the way to go?

You’ve probably heard the advice that to achieve success, you need to set specific, or SMART, goals (where SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timebound). SMART goals can give you a framework for achieving fitness, giving you a target to shoot for. “Fitness” isn’t very specific, but committing to reaching 10,000 steps each day, or practicing yoga three times per week are examples of SMART goals—specific and measurable, certainly, and maybe even achievable and realistic.

But that might not work for everyone, according to new research. If you’ve ever felt defeated by not meeting your SMART goals and just give up, consider open goals. With an open goal, you’ll start with the idea of “fitness” and see where that takes you. For example, you could say, “Let’s see how many steps I can take today,” or “Let’s see how much better I feel with my yoga practice.”

Whichever approach works for you—and it may take a few fails before you find a fitness plan that works for you—be kind to yourself and your body in 2025. That’s a goal we can all work toward.