Thursday, October 1, 2026
“New year, new me” is an all too familiar mindset as the calendar rolls over. Some of the most common New Year’s resolutions are connected to diet and exercise, whether that’s wanting to reach a goal weight, breaking a personal best marathon pace, or simply choosing a healthier lifestyle.
We reached out to Cody Ringle, the senior lead of coaching at Active Life, a fitness training facility on East Park Avenue, to discuss the best tips for anyone who wants to get started in the new year.
Q: Everybody says, “January 1 is the time for my fitness resolution.” Any do’s and don’ts when it comes to setting those goals?
A: The first point here is, 91% of New Year’s resolutions fail. Often what people do is, they’ll push off starting in January when the body of evidence says that 9% of people are actually going to follow through on the thing.
There’s a bunch of different ways to set goals. Find the thing that works for you. What I like to do, personally, is envision, “OK, five years from now, what’s the outcome?” But some people struggle to put themselves in that mental state, so do a rewind first. Go back five years. What were you thinking? What were you doing?
Once you have, “OK, here’s what I want in five,” you reverse engineer. What needs to be true in one year? The next six months? 90 days? Got it. Now chunk it down to the things you need to do on a weekly basis.
There’s something very powerful about writing things down. That can be a great step for people who are goal-setting. Just write them down. Only 3% of people actually write their goals down on paper. That means 97% of people don’t even have a rough draft of what they want their life to look like.
Q: When somebody decides, “I want to eat better,” what guidelines can help?
A: Two things immediately come to mind that are easy. Consuming enough water — half your bodyweight in ounces is a decent target. For most people, that’s going to be between 80 and 120 ounces per day.
And eating unprocessed foods. “Unprocessed foods” meaning that it came from the source to you without going through a bunch of extra steps. It’s simple: it either came from an animal or from the ground — meat, veggies, and fruit.
If you can do that most of the time, you’re going to make good progress towards a nutrition-based goal. Most people under consume protein and over consume processed carbs. I’ve never met anyone overweight or unhealthy because they ate too much fruit.
Q: If someone wants to begin exercising for the first time, what’s a good place to start?
A: Hire somebody and work with them one on one. Specifically, hire a professional who’s going to start by assessing you. There’s a lot of different ways you can assess. You might think that you need to start to deadlift, but you don’t actually have the flexibility to lift something from the floor. So if you go to start deadlifting, you could injure yourself.
When people say, “You shouldn’t deadlift,” that’s a silly bumper sticker because that’s saying that you should never have to pick something up off of the floor or tie your shoes. Start with assessment.
Q: Some people think they need to start by getting 10,000 steps per day. Is that a problem-solver?
A: 10,000 steps is a good general baseline of activity. There’s some good data to support that, if you are achieving 10,000 steps, then you have a higher quality of life and a longer life expectancy. But that’s activity. That’s not exercise.
Activity can be taken away from you. You can lose the ability to walk. Exercise is a specific tool to elicit a specific outcome.
Q: What if somebody has been working out consistently. What’s something they can do to get even better results?
A: The first step is getting clear on what their goal is. Why are you doing this? That is going to inform what modality you should be exercising within.
If you want to run a marathon, yes, you should be doing some strength training. And you should also be doing some progressive running program that keeps you from getting injured. If you want to be bigger and stronger, what is “stronger?” To your bench press? To your squat? Is that 10 percent? 50 percent?
Get clear on what your goal actually is, so that you can have more intention on what the plan needs to be.
