Our New Year Whole Life Challenge (WLC) is complete! Congrats to those that stuck it out for the 6 weeks. At times it felt very long and difficult to stick to, especially with the restrictive nutrition plan, but overall I think it is a great exercise in discipline — just like a Challenge should be! For you Challengers out there, the key now is to not fall off the wagon, but stay within the guidelines of good habits, even if in a more relaxed way.
I’m looking forward to our Nutrition Seminar this Saturday at the gym, 11:30am — I hope everyone that is available will join us to keep up some good momentum or get some education and motivation to get started making some healthy changes.
As a bit of a debrief from the WLC, I wanted to share my top three lessons learned from this year. The Challenge itself is always a little different, and my experience has been different each year that I have participated.
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- You don’t have to be perfect to make progress. I was anything but perfect with my nutrition, with lots of special events and parties that steered me off-course, but the WLC guidelines and all my teammates’ support kept bringing me back in and the next day I was back on track. I feel like I definitely gained some nutritional momentum again, and because of that, some endurance/conditioning gains through the Challenge.
- Hydration and sleep are important. Big newsflash here, right? But going along with gaining some nutritional momentum, I think the additional sleep and the focus on getting the appropriate amount of water in my system every day helped tremendously with my recovery from CrossFit and endurance workouts.
- Disconnect to Connect. One of my favorite weekly Wellness challenges was to not use your phone or computer in the evening (I think it was 2 hours before bed). Not allowing myself that distraction and time sink made me look elsewhere for evening entertainment, like my family! Hey, who knew they were there? Denee and I liked this practice so much we are currently repeating it as a family exercise for Lent. Less time on the Instagram machine, and more time connecting with my wife and kids, playing board games, playing basketball in the driveway, and just talking to each other. Feels like a very positive development. So, if I don’t “like” your Facebook post right away, now you know why!
I would be interested to hear any key lessons learned or other feedback from the WLC from others that participated! And if you didn’t but are interested for next time and have some questions, shoot them my way!
Ryan