The 2023 Secret to Achieve Any Fitness Goal

5 Key Principles to Change Your Life

By Amanda Stevens

You know the pattern. It’s the new year. You tell yourself it’s time to get fit (or fitter). You buy a gym membership, plan your diet, and are excited to get started. Then inevitably, like millions of other people every year, you begin to fall back into old habits by February or March. By the end of the year, you’re not nearly as close to accomplishing your goal as you had hoped.

How can you prevent the same thing from happening in 2023?
The secret is five key and proven principles to help you stay motivated, push yourself harder, and get the recovery you need:

• Stay on Schedule.
• Track Every Workout.
• Get Quality Sleep.
• Manage Your Stress.
• Stay Balanced.

Whether you want to lose weight, gain muscle, improve your flexibility, improve your cardiovascular health, and/or improve your strength, sticking to these principles will guarantee you results.

Combine them with a health oriented smartwatch, such as the Health Smartwatch 3, and you’re in the fastlane for fitness success.

Let’s dive into why each of these principles is important and how the right smartwatch can aid every step of the process.

Stay on Schedule

Every routine is only as effective as it is followed. Consistency is key. One month of consistent daily exercise, even for 20 minutes, is infinitely more effective than one or two days of crazy exercise.

Everyone knows this, yet we end up constantly skipping workouts or cutting them short. Why?

In today’s world, there are two major challenges to sticking to a routine:

• It’s difficult to stay motivated.
• It’s easy to get distracted.

Here are the solutions to these problems. For motivation, we have some bad news and good news. The bad news is that there is no secret to wanting to exercise every time you should. Even the fittest people in the world don’t always *feel* like working out. The good new is, you can train yourself to do it, even if you don’t feel like it.

One of the best ways to train yourself to exercise, regardless of how you feel, is to set alarms and reminders. When that alarm or reminder goes off, you do exactly what you said you would–whether it’s to run for 30 minutes or go to the gym. Over time, this response will become automatic, and you won’t even feel the urge to ignore it.

A good smartwatch will have an effective alarm/reminder feature, so no matter where you are, you won’t miss that key reminder to stick to your plan. We strongly recommend the Health Smartwatch 3, as the alarm feature is super easy to use, and the battery life lasts over 2 weeks, so you’ll never miss an important alarm because your watch was dead or charging.

As for distractions, we live in a fast paced world where every business call and social text can force you to leave the treadmill. Again, a great smartwatch will mitigate this risk. Find one with handsfree calling and text notifications. That way you can take that key call or glance at that text, without pulling out your phone or cutting your workout short.

Track Every Workout

Tracking every workout is another important way to stay motivated, and ensure you do a little bit more every time. Even for veteran fitness enthusiasts, writing down exactly what they did and recording all the key data is a massive pain in the butt.

Making it even harder, is that the majority of people still use their phone for this function. That means lugging around your bulky phone on runs, yoga sessions, and to the gym, then manually finding and entering the data you need.

We strongly recommend you replace your phone with a smartwatch. The right smartwatch will automatically track your step count, heart rate, and blood oxygen levels (the higher the better) over time, just like the Health Smartwatch 3. That way you only need to focus on giving you all to your workout, not recording it too.

Long term, with the right smartwatch, you can view your daily data and measure long term trends. Nothing is more satisfying or motivating than watching your heart rate decline or blood oxygen levels go up, as you do the same workout.

Get Quality Sleep

Never underestimate the importance of sleep. Getting the right amount of quality sleep ensures you adequately recover from your workouts, while also ensuring you can give your next workout the maximum level of effort. Failing to get good sleep is one of the primary reasons otherwise great routines fail.

So how do you get quality sleep? The most important thing is to get enough. Set a daily bedtime, and stick to it (see principle 1). Avoid viewing screens, eating, and stressful activity a few hours before your bedtime, so you go to bed soon after you lay down.

The next most important thing is to ensure you’re actually getting the maximum benefit from your sleep time. Many people wake up in the middle of the night, toss and turn, and/or snore, interfering with important sleep cycles and reducing all the best benefits of sleep. To get the best sleep, you need to spend time in all four stages of sleep, including N1, N2, N3, and REM. Have you ever woken up after a long sleep and felt tired? You’re probably suffering from poor sleep quality.

How do you know if your sleep quality is actually good? Before you’d have to guess from context or participate in an expensive, invasive sleep study. Luckily, the year is 2023, and many devices, such as the Health Smartwatch 3, have native sleep monitoring apps. These apps will measure the duration of each cycle, see how you move between each cycle throughout the night, and ultimately deliver a daily score objectively telling you how good your sleep that night was. Make sure you get a watch with a super long battery life (think the Health Smartwatch 3’s 14+ days), so you never have to choose between measuring your sleep quality and charging your watch.

Manage Your Stress

Nothing hurts your sleep, distracts you, or compromises your workouts like too much stress. Stress ultimately impedes recovery time as well as the overall effectiveness of your workouts.

We know–it’s 2023 and life is super stressful, but the trick is you don’t have to be super stressed. Meditation, yoga, and mindfulness are all great tricks you can use to reduce your stress levels, and live a longer, fitter, and happier life.

A great way to create a stress management plan, and stick to it, is to employ a health smartwatch. Any decent one, such as the Health Smartwatch 3, will have a stress tracker. This tracker will see when, how much, and how often your body has unhealthy levels of stress. Over time you can use this data to make healthier life decisions–whether it just means meditating more or switching jobs.

As an added bonus, the Health Smartwatch 3 has a guided breathing app. This is essentially a guided meditation that you can use daily, or whenever you’re notified that your stress levels are particularly high.

What’s really cool is that as you exercise and meditate more, you will naturally see your unhealthy stress levels fall, just by nature of you being healthier.

Stay Balanced

We know we’ve shared a lot of information with you, but if there’s one key principle–it’s to live a balanced life. Make a fitness plan and stick to it, but focus your mental energies on other aspects of your life. This will make fitness an enduring part of your identity, and not just a seasonal obsession.

The right smartwatch can help you do this. Pick one where you can easily toggle between fitness displays, lifestyle ones, and minimalist ones. Fitness is only one area of your life, the best watch will only show you the fitness data when you need it, and be useful for other areas of your life too.

The Health Smartwatch 3, for example, lets you easily swap out the bands, so you can use a silicon one for working out, a leather one for work, and a stainless steel one for going out. Also the watch is fully waterproof, so it’s ready to accompany you for laps in the pool, or a relaxing vacation on the beach.