People tend to have unrealistic notions of overhauling their lives and trying to do everything at once in the New Year. As health professionals, we can help highlight the places where they can make a difference. It’s all about small steps, education and information.

Clubs should sit down with members, discuss their resolutions and help them set realistic goals. Resolutions need a starting point but also an end point. Our programmes tend to be 12 weeks, so we can evaluate progress and set new goals.

Changing behaviour must be done incrementally. Too often New Year’s resolutions fail because people try to do too much too soon, not taking into account the fact that their situation, lifestyle and responsibilities are the same as in December – large-scale change is impossible, even with the best intentions.

After the Christmas excesses, many people want to start diets. We discourage fad diets, because taking away food groups can put the body into shock and sometimes it can respond by holding on to fat. It’s important to phase foods out gradually and bring them back in gradually. Don’t go straight in to a new diet – prepare for it. Take a few things out, add a few things and make sure you have the right nutrients.

Diets based on calories, rather than nutrition, will also fail in the long run because they don’t sort out sugar cravings or change tastes or metabolism.

It’s also important to impress on members that working out hard in the gym doesn’t cancel out an unhealthy diet: it’s all about getting those two elements working together.

There are three obvious times in the calendar when people’s personal interest in fitness is heightened: the New Year (fresh start), early summer (about to bare flesh) and post summer (bared too much flesh and massively indulged). These are the times when the media focuses more attention on fitness, precisely because it’s when everyone has a just reason to get excited.

As an industry, any chance to trigger good intentions, and a little more activity, can only be good. However, New Year’s resolutions take advanced planning – it’s no good just rocking up in January and putting together some goals on the hoof.

While there should be ongoing dialogue around plans and goals throughout the year, the opportunity to spend focused time with your client, mapping out the detail, is something not be missed. For some people, the New Year period is critical to how they establish their entire year of training and development, so it’s a great time to engage with clients.

This shouldn’t be just part of a normal PT session either. Make an appointment, sit down together, discuss, plan and enthuse about the goals and programme.

Don’t charge for this appointment: lawyers might want to charge clients for every minute in which discussions take place, but that’s exactly why everyone hates lawyers! This is your time to make sure that the work you’re paid for is correct, planned and appropriate.

At Matt Roberts Personal Training, we plan our clients’ goals, schedule, regime, diet and rewards before the Christmas and New Year season kicks off. By going into the potential damage period with a plan, two things happen: the client knows what’s coming and actually stays more focused on not letting go too much; and secondly, there’s a very clear, agreed plan of attack to stick to afterwards, so that malaise can’t set in or carry on.

Some people respond well to a strict dictat as a way of sticking to the promises they’ve made to themselves, but as a trainer you need to establish what approach your client responds to.

Often New Year’s resolutions focus on the outcome and end point, but we need to look for ways of making sure they’re a part of people’s lives past the end of January, by structuring challenges that will make people want to continue.

My experience of working in the gym industry was that gyms always set targets like who can run the furthest or the fastest, or do the most push-ups. The fittest members would instantly post up unbeatable scores and the less able felt it wasn’t for them. Ideally people should set their own goals and measure progress against themselves rather than others.

My business partner Martin Yelling and I took all this into consideration when creating Jantastic, a digital New Year’s fitness product which had 30,000 users this year. It’s a 12-week commitment, setting a target to get people through the winter. It started out as a running challenge and we extended it to become a triathlon challenge, by adding swim and bike. We’d love to collaborate with gym operators to add gym sessions as well.

In the first four weeks, people set a target of how many sessions they will do. In the second four weeks, they also set the distance of the longest run/swim/bike ride they will do, and in the final four weeks they predict a time to complete that longest session. People are scored by percentages, so if they’re aiming for six sessions overall and complete four, they get 66 per cent. We encourage people to aim for 90 per cent or more and are confident – if they set the right goals in the first place – that those who reach 90 per cent will see huge health benefits.

As a challenge it works because it levels the playing field – people are competing against themselves – plus it takes them through to the spring and sets a habit. We’ve considered making it a year-round product, but we think it’s more powerful to just run it through the winter, as it encourages focus.

Given that more than 50 per cent of the population make a New Year’s resolution to change their behaviour, it’s perhaps surprising that there are very few studies on whether resolutions are successful or not. Research available suggests it’s not making a resolution per se that determines whether a person changes their behaviour, but rather the nature and quality of those resolutions.

At its most basic, a resolution is simply a statement of intent to change behaviour. As such, resolutions that are SMARTer and specified in terms of behaviour (such as go swimming twice a week) rather than outcome-based (such as get fitter) are more likely to change behaviour.

Nevertheless, there’s a gaping chasm between stated intention and actual behavioural change, and the research clearly shows that very few people successfully manage the leap.

Resolutions are more likely to be successful if the individual is equipped with the skills and social support for the change, and can future-proof it by making it habitual. Fitness providers are great at offering opportunities to practise physical activity resolutions, but unless they supplement this by teaching people the skills they need to build activity into their daily routines, they will fail to support customers in bridging the intention-behaviour gap.