Four things that took us years to learn but that are virtually guaranteed to improve your long-term wellbeing

When you’ve decided that you need to make a change to improve your physical health and mental wellbeing, it won’t be long before you’re bombarded with information on what to do. Most of it will be useful, but it’s easy to get overwhelmed and it can become hard to see the wood for the trees.

Thankfully, when you’ve covered wellbeing for as long as we have, you learn that there are a handful of things that really make a difference, and you can take or leave the rest.

When BetterMe, the award-winning wellness app, asked us to create a guide to building a wellness routine that actually sticks, we saw that many parts of its service spoke to our combined experience about what really works.

So we thought it would be helpful to take a step back and tell you those simple tenets that have helped us, and may well help you, too.

1. You need to respect your starting point

To decide what to do first, you have to recognise where you are. There are lots of great workouts to follow online, but the best is the one that’s in your Goldilocks zone—not too hard that you struggle to complete the exercises safely and injure yourself, and not so easy that you don’t challenge your body enough for it to respond.

The more experience we gained, the easier it was to figure out what’s appropriate, but when you’re just starting out, using something like BetterMe’s starter quiz is really helpful. It asks you for your goals, your vital statistics and your activity levels, among other things, then directs you to the appropriate starting place, with workouts, nutrition advice and strategies that can help you approach the changes you’re looking to make with a positive mindset.

That means postpartum mums will get suggestions for gentle workouts that help improve their pelvic floor strength, while seniors will find plenty of low-impact workouts that build strength without over-taxing joints.

One of BetterMe’s app users said it best: “I love […] the fact that the level of difficulty is personally adapted.”

2. You need a plan that grows with you

We have seen time and time again the difference that following a plan makes. Not having to decide what you’re doing that day makes everything much more straightforward—whether that’s completing a workout or preparing your evening meal. “I really appreciate having my workouts chosen for me daily,” said one user. “All I have to do is open the app and press start.”

A well-designed workout plan also nails that crucial detail of improving your physical health by gradually increasing the challenge. There are many ways to do this, but often that will mean adding some extra equipment to increase the resistance you’re working with and to keep things interesting.

BetterMe Store, a part of BetterMe's wellness ecosystem, offers a range of equipment. It finds users who add its equipment are more consistent than those who only stick with the bodyweight options.

Its Pilates Power Kit includes a range of bands, dumbbells and other props to progress your practice, complemented with a dedicated workout collection that targets different body zones and offers adaptive modifications for all fitness levels.

For a small taste of its equipment workout, BetterMe shared two exclusive workouts with Fit&Well readers using light dumbbells for one, and a Pilates ring for the other. Of course, there’s a library of more than 4,000 workouts in the app so you’ll find one that suits you.

3. You need a plan that fits your schedule

Even when your job is in the fitness world like ours, there’s limited time to work out and whatever you do has to fit around the responsibilities you have at home. While you may be able to manage to travel to the gym for an hour’s workout one week, if you can’t spare the time to do that every week, it’s all too easy to do nothing at all and eventually give up.

“Movement should fit into your life, not the other way around,” says BetterMe coach Brittni Johnson, and we couldn’t agree more.

It’s much better to commit to bite-sized workouts you’re confident you can slip into your schedule.

Speaking to Fit&Well for our Workout Diaries series, Johnson says “exercise snack breaks, like a 10-minute mobility flow or 10 minutes of walking between meetings, can be really beneficial.”

This often means working out at home, but that doesn’t mean you’re settling for second best. One app user wrote: “I decided to try BetterMe and got better results than I did at the gym.”

There’s even the option to access one-on-one coaching with one of BetterMe’s extensive network of trainers and nutrition coaches to help you shape your plan when there’s a vacation coming up, or you’re dealing with a stressful situation.

4. You need your diet to work for you

It’s a cliche that you can’t outtrain a bad diet, but there’s no getting away from it. The good news is that you can improve a bad diet beyond all recognition with small, tasty changes that don’t require onerous restrictions.

Just as BetterMe’s workout suggestions take the thinking out of what to do and they’re short enough to fit into your routine, BetterMe’s meal plans make cooking for yourself easy, and they don’t require you to spend all evening cooking.

There are more than 20 plans to choose between, including one based on the Mediterranean diet, a high-protein diet that can be especially helpful as you get older to maintain muscle mass, and a lazy girl plan (because there’s a lazy girl in all of us) that prioritizes quick and easy recipes. There are also options for people with type 1 and type 2 diabetes and plenty of free-from options.

You don’t have to cook every meal, though. BetterMe’s AI calorie tracker allows you to take a photo of what you’re eating and it’ll integrate it into your plan, with information on calories and macronutrient content.

BetterMe also offers practical tips based on psychology that support a healthy relationship with food, so it’s an enriching part of your life, rather than something you struggle with.

We hope those four fundamentals stick with you (we really do, we’re still suffering the after effects of an injury when we didn’t respect our starting point). Even if you lose sight of them, they’re a great set of principles to come back to.

If you’d like some help putting them into practice, see what a personalised BetterMe plan looks like for you.