How To Thrive in 2025

Many of us use the New Year as a spur to make some changes to our lives. We hope you put your health and wellbeing close to the top of your list!

To help you do this, we have produced eight top tips to get you started…….

1. Take Stock

It is much more difficult to improve your health and wellness through 2025 if you don’t have the motivation of knowing you are making progress. This means understanding your starting position and setting some goals for the year ahead…..

• Where are you currently?
• Where do you want to be?
• And where should you focus your efforts?

One excellent tool to help you do this is a health & wellness evaluation. This examines how you are performing in the four fundamental wellness areas of healthy eating/nutrition, sleep, stress management and movement. It provides a detailed assessment of your current status and identifies what actions you can start to take immediately to help improve your health outcomes for the long term. Full details, including how to book your evaluation, are available here.

Another way to take stock is by working with our PT team. They will do a baseline gym assessment and help you to monitor your progress as you head through the year. Details of our excellent PT team can be found here.

2. Exercise Regularly

Recent research has highlighted that exercising “little and often” can be much more beneficial than longer periods of exercise done less frequently. The benefits of a quick 10-20 minute burst should not be overlooked. The important thing is to try to “move” every day, even if it is just by grabbing a walk at lunchtime, in the middle of a busy day.  

Try to develop a routine or pattern to your exercise that works with the rest of your life – you are much more likely to stick to it. Can you stretch when you first get up? Do some weights in front of the TV? Do an on-line fitness class from Club Towers Live at home? You don’t always have to make it into the Club.

And if you are still struggling for motivation, why not find a fitness buddy to help? Exercising with others helps motivation and engagement and can make exercising more fun and hence more effective.

3. Stay Motivated Past February

Every year, gyms across the country see the same pattern of incredible enthusiasm and attendance during January and February, before gradually tailing off through March and April. So how can you stay motivated past the end of February? We have a few suggestions that might help:

• Get help from a Personal Trainer – having a pre-arranged appointment with a personal trainer or coach can really help you to stay motivated during those low periods. And you get the expert tuition you need to keep your exercise routines fresh and interesting. You will find details of all of our tremendous PT team right here so you can choose one that you think might work well with you. Or just speak to them when you see them in the gym.
• Mix up your exercise – don’t do the same things every time you come to the Club. Make sure you get a variety of strength and cardio work; try different classes; incorporate walking, cycling and/or stretching. The more variety you introduce, the more interesting your programme will become. Have something new planned for early March!
• Make it Social – Why not train with a partner or make friends in your class(es). Stay for a coffee afterwards. Making your exercise a social activity can make it feel so much more fun. And the Club is a great place to do this.
• Book or set yourself a Challenge – having something to train for will help you stay focused. It could be a run (marathon, half-marathon or 10K), or a personal goal in the gym, or any other goal. Make it tough but realistic for you.

4. Learn a New Sport or Skill

Learning something new is always fascinating – especially when we are making progress and doing it with others. So why not take up tennis, squash or racketball? Try cycling/spin? Take up yoga and improve your balance and flexibility? Do some boxing/combat? Or learn to swim/improve your swimming technique?

With sports like tennis, squash or racketball, you can join the box leagues to meet others of a similar standard, and we run free introductory coaching sessions to help you get started and make the most of the sport.

Racketball is particularly easy to learn for beginners and gives a great cardio workout. Our next free beginner tennis course (Start-rite) kicks off in January.  For more information on any of the racquets options, please contact [email protected].

We also run regular beginner and technique sessions for spin and body pump respectively. You can find details of these via the App or by asking at Reception.

We run adult swimming course twice a year in Spring and Autumn for both beginners and improvers and you can get full details of the next ones from Reception.

5. Do More Stretching

We are at our most flexible as babies, and our flexibility reduces every year as we age, with a particularly sharp drop off once we hit our 50s. Stretching is such a valuable form of exercise and is not necessarily easy!

There are lots of ways you can do this, but yoga, pilates and body balance classes are all great ways to make a start. Why not try them all and see which ones work best for you? Once you have some experience, you can build your own stretching routine to do daily.

And finally, if you don’t feel comfortable heading into a yoga class immediately, don’t forget you can try them at home first using our on-line classes via Club Towers Live (www.clubtowerslive.com)

6. Eat More Healthily

When people focus on their eating habits, they are often very negative in their approach: what should I cut out of my diet? How many fewer calories should I eat? But healthy eating does not necessarily mean dieting or calorie counting and we try to encourage you to take a more positive approach.

This normally means thinking carefully about your eating habits and making sensible and sustainable adjustments. This, in turn, might mean thinking about your wider lifestyle habits and how these might be adapted to help you eat a healthier diet.

We run a number of courses to help you better understand how you can change your eating patterns (and hence improve your health) for the long term. As one example, take a look at our 16-week course entitled: “Master the Fundamentals of Healthy Eating in just 16-weeks”. This will start to equip you with the tools to make the adjustments that will benefit you in the short, medium and longer term.  You can find full details here.

7. Rest Well

If you are doing lots of exercise activity, it is vital to ensure that you create periods of rest to let your body recover, help avoid injury and re-energise yourself ready to go again!

And don’t ignore those minor niggles – they have a habit of turning into major ones. So, get them looked at early and they can often be sorted quickly. Our in-Club partners North Beds Osteopaths and Kinetic MSK are both excellent at helping with this!

8. Seek Help If You Need It!

Everyone needs a little help and support from time to time and at the Club there are plenty of places you can find it! Here are the main contact points for you:

Personal Training Team – see Personal Trainer Profiles – Club Towers

Nutrition & Wellness Coach – Ann Towers – [email protected]

Tennis Coaches – Tennis Coaches Profiles – Club Towers

Squash Coaches – Squash Coaches at Club Towers – Club Towers

Reception Team – [email protected]

Membership Team – [email protected]

We hope you enjoy your exercise at the Club in 2025!!

The Club Towers Team