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.

You might see some yoga studios or gyms offering 30-day challenges. These challenges are intended to whip participants into shape within a month and get them on the fast-track to fitness by doing exercise every day for a month.

However, according to yoga instructor Dan Durand, this approach doesn't necessarily work for everyone.

After 15 years of teaching hot yoga around town, Durand, who now co-owns and teaches at One Hour Hot Yoga with his wife Keiko Mihara, said he consistently saw people drop out and never return.

"Right at the end [of the challenge] I said, 'Okay, the real challenge is how many classes you do next month' and it's almost always zero," Durand said by phone.

He said after 10 or 20 days in a row, people tend to get exhausted. While taking a break, they often slip back into their old patterns "which tends to happen with everyone that kind of gets started and goes wholehearted. They burn out and then never restart again until the following year or years later."

That's why he's not offering it at his studio—he doesn't think it's a good business model as it turns people away.

While he said some people can hack it, most people need recovery time, particularly with something already as intense and challenging as hot yoga is in itself.

That's why he advises people to pace themselves, and schedule something that's sustainable over the long-term.

"The ones who stick with it are the ones who do it once or twice a week," he said. "It fits in their life. It's do-able. And that has the biggest impact over a lifetime I think."

Doing something less but consistently over time has a cumulative effect. Durand says it's important to work within your time restrictions and energy to find something that is achievable but constant.

"Somehow if people can think of the big picture, not just at the start of the year, but average out over the whole year and instead of having to make time for themselves, just schedule in something that you actually have time for," he said. "So even if you did one class a week for the whole year, there's 52 times you treat yourself right instead of 20 days of the month and never come the rest of the year."

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.