Happy New Year – Join our habit creation challenge for 2018!
As we say at the brand new HeiaHeia.com login page, “Wellbeing is not a project that lasts for two weeks in January, it’s a life long journey.” What we mean by this is that short term activity boosts or irregular healthy actions are a good start, but they do not have much of an impact on your wellbeing. What matters most is the long term, things that you do daily or almost daily that accumulate into long term health gains.
Our challenge for you for 2018 is to create one new habit that improves your wellbeing:
- Habit #1: Regular exercise. Aim to exercise over 3 times per week throughout the year.
- Habit #2: Balanced exercise. If you already do one thing like running or strength training regularly, aim for a trio of endurance, strength, and mobility exercises in a balanced way.
- Habit #3: Everyday activity. Change your regular daily routes so that you get 10 000 (or e.g. 8000) steps on a normal day without any “extra effort”.
- Habit #4: Enough sleep. Pick a regular bed time that results in an adequate amount of sleep. Avoid “sleep killers” like work emails or heavy exercise too close to your bed time.
- Habit #5: Healthy nutrition. Increase your veggie intake, cut excess sugar, or some other concrete change.
- Habit #6: Your choice. Anything else that is good for you!
The challenge goes like this:
- Pick your desired new habit. If you like to, challenge a friend to join you.
- Create an annual training goal in HeiaHeia (under “Account”) and a respective weekly target (in the header bar of our apps, you can track your exercises, other wellness tasks, steps, and sleep on a weekly level). An example annual goal for Habit #2: “My goals for 2018: 100 times endurance training, 50 times strength training, 50 times mobility exercises.”
- Start logging activities that contribute to your goal.
- Follow your progress week by week and make sure you meet your weekly goals. Taking a break during vacations is ok, but otherwise you can only create habits by frequent actions.
- Enjoy your achievements: HeiaHeia gives you medals on 10-25-50-75-100-150-200-300-400-500-… times you log an activity. Remember to share your achievements with friends!
Make sure to utilise support from your friends in creating new habits – we’re going to change our cheering functionality in the early days of January and give all cheers to all users at all times! If you think you would benefit from more data, make sure to connect your wearable device to HeiaHeia. Psst. As another New Year’s treat, the biggest update for HeiaHeia in a long time is just around the corner, so stay tuned!
For more inspiration, read our 3 easy tips for improving your physical activity from Hintsa Performance’s blog.
