September Is The Real New Year For Fitness
THE GAINS HUB #015
Reading Time: 6 minutes
January is supposed to be the month when everyone gets their act together, although it’s never made much sense when you think about it. It’s dark before most people finish work, Christmas has just emptied your bank account, half the office has a cold and we’re somehow expected to choose that exact moment to start training five times a week and living on perfectly prepared meals.
September has a much better case for being the point where the year starts again.
For most of us, July and August are messy months. Holidays move weeks around, weekends fill up, the weather occasionally remembers it’s summer and suddenly sitting outside with a drink sounds considerably better than going to the gym after work. Even people who normally train consistently can find themselves doing a bit less, eating differently and generally losing some of the structure they had earlier in the year.
Then September arrives and normal life starts creeping back in. Schools go back, people return from holidays, work settles into its usual rhythm and the diary becomes slightly more predictable. You might not particularly enjoy all of those things, but they’re useful if you’re trying to train regularly because consistency is much easier when Tuesday actually looks roughly like Tuesday did last week.
There’s also something about September that still feels like the beginning of a new year, even when you haven’t owned a school timetable for decades. Maybe it’s years of going back after the summer holidays, but September has always had that sense of getting organised again: new term, new routine, clean slate, only now nobody is making you cover an exercise book in sticky-backed plastic.
The gym usually tells the same story. People who disappeared for a few weeks start coming back, running clubs get busier and routines that became fairly optional during summer suddenly become part of the week again. The mistake is thinking you need to make up for the time you weren’t there, because if August consisted of two gym sessions, a couple of runs and considerably more time in beer gardens than you’d planned, launching straight into a five-day training split isn’t going to somehow balance the books.
More likely, you’ll spend the first week destroying yourself, discover muscles you’d forgotten existed and start negotiating with yourself about whether Thursday’s leg session could technically be moved to next Monday. Two or three decent sessions is a perfectly good first week back, particularly if the alternative is doing far too much for ten days before disappearing again.
The weights might feel heavier than they did in June and your first run might have you checking whether somebody has secretly added hills to your usual route, but that doesn’t mean you’ve gone back to square one. Fitness comes back, strength comes back and, after a few weeks, training normally starts feeling normal again. There’s very little benefit in trying to force that process into the first seven days.
More importantly, September isn’t late. There are still four months until the end of the year, which is a serious amount of time when you stop looking at it as the bit between summer and Christmas. Sixteen weeks of reasonably consistent training can change quite a lot: you can get noticeably stronger, take minutes off a 10K, build muscle, lose body fat or simply reach January with a routine that’s already survived long enough to become part of your life.
That last one might actually be the most useful goal, because January fitness plans have a habit of being built for an imaginary version of ourselves who has unlimited time, never finishes work late and apparently doesn’t have plans at the weekend. September gives you the chance to build something around the year you’ve already been living, with several months of evidence showing you what realistically fits and what clearly doesn’t.
If you intended to train four times a week earlier this year but nearly always managed three, maybe three is your programme. If evening sessions repeatedly got binned because work ran over, try mornings or weekends rather than promising yourself you’ll suddenly become more disciplined. If Saturday morning training disappeared every time Friday night became remotely interesting, there’s probably not much point pretending that particular battle is suddenly going to end differently either.
A routine doesn’t become better because it’s harder to follow, and one of the easiest ways to make progress is to stop treating the perfect week as the minimum acceptable one. Three sessions every week for the next four months gives you somewhere around 50 workouts before January, which looks considerably more useful written down than five sessions this week followed by another attempt at getting motivated sometime in October.
Food doesn’t need a September overhaul either. Getting back to eating reasonably well most of the time, putting some protein into your meals and doing a food shop before the fridge contains nothing but condiments will probably achieve more than announcing that you’re cutting out sugar, takeaways, alcohol and anything enjoyable until Christmas. Summer doesn’t need paying back with four months of punishment.
There’s another practical advantage to starting now: you get to find out whether your routine actually works before the difficult part of the year arrives. The clocks change, evenings get darker, the weather gets worse and December starts filling weekends with Christmas plans, so a training habit that has already been running for a couple of months stands a much better chance than one you’re trying to create in the middle of all that.
That’s really the point of a September reset. It doesn’t need the drama January gives everything, and there’s no grand transformation that needs announcing before you’re allowed back into the gym. You had a summer, maybe training went brilliantly, maybe it became a bit inconsistent, or maybe you barely trained at all. Start again this week, then do it again next week, and let a fairly ordinary routine do its job.
By the time everyone else starts talking about New Year’s resolutions, you could already be four months in.
Continue Reading