Danger! If you’ve ever wondered why those New Year’s resolutions to get more fit don’t last much more than a month at the most, this might be why.

This type of complacency occurs about a month after the start of a fitness journey. Quite a bit of progress has been made but the stress caused by adding fitness into an already packed schedule is also setting in.

Due to this, people sometimes become content enough with the progress they’ve made to quit entirely. Paradoxically, the success is what causes people to feel like they “can do it at anytime, it’s so easy.” When the reality is, once you stop, it’s considerably harder to get back on track. Pretty soon, all the hard work from the first month is undone and the cycle starts anew.

I experienced this about two months in but for the most part, a month seems more common. I felt it right around the end of the first quarter of my senior year. Tests were coming up and I almost gave up on fitness entirely. Not out of apathy, but out of thinking I could just pick it back up once the tests were over.

It was at this time that I had to rely on my workout buddy. For those who don’t know, workout buddies are people who you go workout with. It may seem silly but there’s a decent amount of psychology behind it. Socially, people like doing what others are doing. When we see someone we know working out, we’re more inclined to workout. It kind of relates to my solution to the first type of complacency. When I saw people working out in my feed everyday, I was inspired to workout as well.

For me, my workout buddy was my mom. She had started going to the gym much before I did but when she saw me making an effort she offered to go with me. When the “one month in” complacency started to set in, she was the one who helped me climb out of it and get back on track.

Workout buddies work wonders, literally.