Fitness forward: A different way to measure fitness

Making New Year's resolutions is easy. Keeping them going, particularly into the first few weeks of February, is the hard part.

We decided to ask fitness professionals what they advise on how to maintain exercise resolutions when the going gets tough.

Leo Sadiua, a yoga instructor who teaches at Yyoga, Westcoast Hot Yoga, and Chopra Yoga, has a unique way of looking at how to gauge the results of your workouts.

"How do you measure fitness?" he asked rhetorically by phone. "Do you measure it by the weight that you lose? Do you measure it by the pounds and sweat and everything like that?"

Sadiua says he regards fitness not as an end in itself, but merely as a means for helping him do other activities.

"For me, to motivate my fitness…it's not about just going to the gym….For me, I measure by fitness by how many times I see the sunset when I run, how many times I do the Grouse Grind in a summer, how many times I cycle Stanley Park in the summer….That's how I measure my fitness—by the activities that I do, not by the weight that I lose or the muscles that I gain….It's not about just going to the gym….It's all about creating memories with your friends."

He says that fitness can be a means for propelling a more active lifestyle, and helping people to enjoy all that this city has to offer.

"Vancouver has this beautiful summer and one of the longest summers in Canada and so instead of just going to the gym, why don't you apply it to going trekking in the summertime, running on the seawall in the summertime, or just cycling around. So it's not just specifically just going to the gym but being more active or doing more stuff outdoors, and also by creating events with your friends like, 'Hey, let's do the Grouse Grind together' or 'Let's go hiking together' or 'Let's run the seawall together'."

And so, in other words, if you change the way you regard measure the outcome of your fitness, it may help you to find more meaning and motivation in keeping a regular exercise routine.

More tips and advice from fitness professionals on how to maintain fitness motivation will be posted here at the Georgia Straight website throughout the month so stay tuned.