Lee Welles

Sometimes I wish my column came out on Mondays instead of Tuesdays. Monday is the beginning of the week: a day ripe with opportunity! Every Sunday I find myself imagining what I can do better in the upcoming week than I’ve done before. Fresh beginnings are a wonderful thing.

Whether you love Mondays or hate them, they re-launch you into your professional life, family/school schedule and, hopefully, a week of healthy habits.

Studies have shown that if you exercise on Monday, you are much more likely to exercise throughout the week. This is amazing to me and illustrates the power of a fresh start.

There are many fresh starts that can get you excited and focused and headed in a healthy direction. A new calendar or day planner is a good one; all those blank days! It screams opportunity. Where might you be in six months? Who will you be meeting with? What exciting place will you find yourself? Have you stopped to imagine that? Using your mind’s eye to see a great future is the very first step in achieving one.

A new calendar can also be used to keep a track record. I’m a big fan of using a monthly calendar to keep track of your exercise. Write in a “C” for cardio activities, “R” for resistance training, “S” for stretching, a star for days you purposefully take off and a large “X” for days you skip unintentionally. You now have the ability to step back and look at 30-day chunks. You may see a pattern. You may see the reason you are not meeting your goals. But first, you have to have that new calendar for a fresh start.

Empty journals and notebooks also give me a thrill. Some people like reality television; I like wandering in office supply stores, drooling over the blank books in which I can record my own reality. A journal can be better than a best friend. You can complain endlessly. However, you will find that if you continue to complain about the same things over and over, you will get just as sick of writing it as your friends are of hearing about it! A journal can show you where your changes are most needed.

New workout clothes, especially shoes, are the epitome of opportunity. When you lace up a new pair of shoes your eyes are almost blinded by their newness, their clean and unblemished state. Imagine what they will look like 50 miles later! You know that, in time, they will take on the familiar tilt and shape that your foot makes. It is hard to ignore a new pair of shoes.

This Tuesday is the vernal equinox. Day length has finally caught up to night and from this point forward the days will get longer and hopefully warmer. Talk about an opportunity! What kind of summer will you have? You could learn tennis. You could run a 10K. You could learn to scuba dive. Carpe diem, my friends!

Lee Welles is a fitness consultant and owner of MARS Fitness Services in Corning. E-mail her at wellcoach@leewelles.com.

Source: Star-Gazette

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