Sticking to New Years Fitness Goals: BowlFit Tips

This is the time of year everyone makes New Years resolutions to make healthier choices, hit the gym, lose weight, eat healthy, the list goes on. While I love the enthusiasm over making changes in pursuit of a healthy lifestyle, I’ve also noticed like many others how many people fall off track within just a few short months- or even weeks! I think there are a few reasons why this happens and I want to give everyone some tips to avoid the fall-out.

1) The goals aren’t realistic. Too often people go “all in” and say they’re goal is to go to the gym 5x/week, lose 50lbs, eat healthy every meal every day, etc. Great goals but the problem is the people making them may have been doing the total opposite for a long time. It’s like going from 0-100 way too fast. Going form working out 0 days a week or maybe one, to 5 days a week is going to be a huge change that may lead to discouragement when you can’t keep up with your plan. Especially when it comes to weight loss, you need to set smaller more realistic goals and understand the big goals are long term.

2) People expect results too soon. In particular, people want weight to fall off as quick as possible. In reality, the healthy way to lose weight and keep it off is a steady 1-2lbs per week.

3) People don’t strength train enough. To lose weight and keep it off and to truly improve your overall health, you must increase muscle mass in order to increase metabolism. Not increasing muscle mass and relying on “cardio” exercises will make it hard to lose weight and keep it off. Lean mass is what makes your body physiologically more efficient.

Your best chance at success is to take smaller steps to get to your end goal. Slowly increase frequency of days at the gym, ease into healthy eating and don’t expect yourself to go cold turkey on foods you love- you’ll end up driving yourself crazy and having an unhealthy relationship with food. Remember to keep your life balanced and once you find you can jump the smaller hurdles you’ll feel more confident and ready to jump the big hurdles!

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About Heather –

Heather D’Errico MS, CSCS, CFSC, LMT

Heather began BowlFit in 2013 with the hope to provide awareness to bowlers about how crucial training off the lanes truly is. She has been an avid bowler her entire life competing as a collegiate bowler for Robert Morris University, assistant coaching at the University of Central Missouri, and now head coaches at Roberts Wesleyan College in Rochester, NY.

She obtained a master’s degree in kinesiology with an emphasis on exercise science and interned with the head strength coach at UCM. She became a certified strength and conditioning specialist (CSCS) through NSCA shortly after graduation and began coaching athletes at Next Level Strength and Conditioning in Fairport, NY.

In October 2015 she received her certified functional strength coach certification and then went back to school in July 2016 for massage therapy. She is now a licensed massage therapist and runs a business called Restorative Bodywork in Rochester, NY that specializes in movement therapy and sports massage.

Heather has also been competing on the PWBA tour the last 3 seasons and continues to use her experiences as a competitive and professional bowler to create programs for bowlers. She enjoys the challenges of making programs specific to each bowler as every person needs to focus on different areas for their performance goals. With that said her training motto is “do no harm” and believes each program should most importantly make a bowler FEEL better and play with minimal injuries/pain.