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.

Excuses, excuses, excuses.

We all have them. We all love them. We're all talented at inventing them. But how do you deal with them when they derail your fitness plan?

Steve Nash Fitness World personal trainer Adam Canales advises one way to handle excuses is to accept their inevitability from the get-go.

"It's about being able to acknowledge that we are going to try and come up with an excuse as to why we are not motivated to go to the gym," he says by phone. "It's about acknowledging that emotion and being able to just do it."

You might have heard advice that it's important to replace bad habits with good ones. Well, Canales points out that making working out a habitual practise is a way to bypass any conflicting thought or emotional processes.

"There's no option," he says. "You just have to do it. It's about being able to realize that when you finish your workout at the gym, you're going to feel better than what you'll be feeling by not going. So it's better to go the gym and feel better after than to not go and feel bad that you didn't do it."

By making going to the gym or doing other physical activities a habit, he opines, it becomes an automatic practise that doesn't require thought.  

"It should just be like eating and sleeping and brushing your teeth," Canales says. 

He recommends setting aside approximately two hours for the gym each day, which factors in travel and preparation time and allows for one solid hour of physical activity.  

From his experience in the industry, what he says he has noticed is that many excuses reflect where a person's priorities lie.

"Sometimes I have a potential client and they don't find time to do it because their priorities are out of whack," he says. "The truth of the matter is you have whatever time you set for yourself. You have to put your health and fitness as a priority."

Something he frequently observes is how people put work ahead of their own health and well-being. However, he points out that there's some convoluted logic in that rationale.

"It's part of decisions that we make as humans to not just to always say, 'Well, I'm working and I'm stuck at work and I'm working so much and blah blah blah' because that's telling me that people prioritize work over health and really the whole point of working is to make money so we can do things to be happy but if we're stressed out all the time, working all the time… then we're not really happy, are we?"

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.