Disclaimer: I am not a health professional, and these are all personal opinions.
As students return back to campus after winter break, it feels like everyone has one thing on their mind: New Year’s Resolutions. While New Year’s Resolutions can definitely be healthy, some people can take them too seriously, which can lead them down a rabbit hole of bad habits.
One example of these bad habits is saying that you will go to the gym more often. Keep in mind, this can definitely still be a healthy resolution; however, a lot of people’s main goal when they go to the gym is not just to stay physically fit, but also to look better in order to fit the societal norms of beauty.
It is easy to find yourself getting trapped in a never-ending cycle of needing to go to the gym in order to feel better about yourself. Then, when you feel too tired to go to the gym for just one day or when something else comes up, you beat yourself up for being “lazy,” and knowing that you could have gone to the gym if you really wanted the results.
While going to the gym is great and keeps your body moving, it’s important to not turn the activity into something obsessive.
- It’s okay to skip a day.
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When you make a plan in your head to go to the gym for a certain number of days throughout the week, it is definitely easier said than done. Some days you’re just too tired and want to sleep a little more before classes, you’re busy with homework or you simply do not want to go and be surrounded by all the gym bros. And that is TOTALLY okay. While you can be upset with yourself for missing a day where progress could have been made, everyone needs a break. The process of going to the gym has to be seen as something that you can partake in, not a strict regimen. Once it becomes something that you don’t want to be disrupted by daily life, that’s when going to the gym becomes unhealthy.
- make sure you keep your motives in check.
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Being on social media, pictures of girls with your dream body type are everywhere you look. This can be seriously damaging to look at, especially since an early age like many college students have experienced. With these images imprinted into our minds, it’s hard to reverse the effects of this. When making the decision, you have to remember that going to the gym is something you are doing for yourself and your physical health. It should not be something done with the sole purpose of looking a certain way. One way to make sure gym trips can be more beneficial for someone that thinks this way would be to try different types of physical exercise. For example, instead of exclusively running on the treadmill five days out of the week, spice it up by going to a cycling class or any of the other classes available to students at Penn State (which are free!).
- Take care of your body.
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When all is said and done, it is important to still respect your body, no matter how often you visit the gym. This means fueling your body with the nutrition that it needs, drinking your water, getting an appropriate amount of sleep and stretching after workouts. Sticking to a healthy lifestyle just through nutrition and hydration can have a bigger impact on you than you may anticipate.
2023 is the year for new outlooks on the gym, and it starts with this.