How To Build a Feel-Good Wellness Routine for 2026

The start of the year is an inflection point for many of us when it comes to health and wellbeing. We change up routines, commit to new food or fitness programs, and prioritise personal targets. All of which can be very helpful, says Lucy Beaumont, as long as we don’t forget to also have fun and feel good.

“You want to be able to come into something and enjoy the process,” the Scout Studios founder tells Broadsheet. “If you don’t enjoy the process then you’re not going to stick with it.”

Since launching Scout Studios in 2019, Beaumont now runs three spaces offering Pilates, yoga and wellness across Sydney – in St Peters, Marrickville and Redfern – and has established a reputation for creating inclusive and accessible environments to move in.

Here she shares her tips for building a feel-good wellness routine for 2026 and beyond.

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Make it manageable

This time of year everyone throws themselves into “new year, new fitness”, but it’s often at an unsustainable level. My big takeaway would be doing something manageable and building it up – try to create a sustainable routine around what days you’re working out and what days you’re resting. It has to work with your lifestyle in the long run.

Look to yourself

Connect back to yourself and work out what you want, rather than feeling like you need to constantly keep up with whatever the latest online trend is. Look at your own lifestyle and your work and your family life, and work out what is achievable.

Where are the pockets of time where you can fit in ways of moving or ways of looking after your body? What aspects of your life need a little bit of a tweak? Is it sleep? Is it resting more? Is it managing mental health? Is it stretching rather than going and doing a HIIT class? At Scout, we offer a really big range of classes to be accessible to everyone. We don’t expect everyone to come and do a strength reformer class every day – there’s yin yoga and stretch classes and breathwork classes and meditation, too.

Set achievable goals

Goal-setting should be very much a balanced view of how you want your life to run. You want mental health, you want to feel fit and strong, you want to sleep well, you want to be able to show up for your friends and family.

The best goals are achievable ones. Working out two or three times a week is a good achievable goal. You don’t need to be coming to class every day – it’s more about creating healthy habits, then you can build up if you feel like building up. And the same goes for other results you might be striving for, whether that’s body composition or strength or flexibility or mental health.

Find something genuinely fun

Try to find fitness habits that really speak to you. What works for your body? What feels really good? It doesn’t have to be what everyone else is doing. Maybe for you it’s a walk in the park, maybe it’s swimming, maybe it’s Pilates, maybe it’s yoga.

Shop around and see what’s out there. Lots of fitness places do introductory offers or discounted classes for newcomers, so you can try a whole lot of different things before you commit. Look at council leisure centres and team sports as well. When you find something you like, generally you’ll stick to it.

Find community

Most of us enjoy moving, but there’s a huge amount of people who feel really nervous about coming into fitness spaces. That’s one of the reasons we try and create a lot of community connections at Scout. We have our core classes, obviously, but we also do a lot of events and workshops and bring in guest instructors. Often that’s how people meet each other, so when they’re in class they see familiar welcoming faces.

We also just think that movement should be accessible. It shouldn’t be just for fit 28-year-olds. It should be for teenagers through to people in their 80s and beyond, and we’ve definitely got clientele running across those demographics. So we have beginner classes, we have pre- and postnatal classes. We have strength classes, meditation, sound healing, sauna, ice baths. We want to appeal to everybody.

Don’t forget to rest

Rest means being able to switch off your brain as well as your body. If you’re scrolling on your phone, you’re not really switching off – you’re being over-stimulated. Try listening to guided meditation, or just listening to music. Or something more directed: guided sauna sessions, contrast therapy, meditation classes, yoga, breathwork. All of these things are becoming quite popular, because it can be quite hard to do it just by yourself. People almost need that forced break, to completely switch off and be in their body.

Create feel-good habits

Try to create little habits – whether it’s getting off the bus one stop earlier or walking around the block at lunchtime – that can really help you feel better at the end of the day. It’s building awareness around health and wellbeing, and how those tiny habits can contribute to a healthier lifestyle in the long run.

A lot of them are pretty simple. Like, try and not be on your phone as soon as you get up in the morning. Have breakfast before you have your first coffee of the day. Try and move for 30 minutes a day – even if that’s a walk or 30 minutes of stretching or 30 minutes of Pilates. Eat regularly, drink enough water, make sure you have a nice wind-down routine before bed.

There’s a simplicity to all of this. Online there’s so much stuff about how hard it needs to be with habit stacking or how many milligrams of protein you need for each meal. It doesn’t have to be like that. It’s about finding little things that work for you and that make you happy as well.

Broadsheet Access will hold an exclusive wellness day with Scout Studios on February 15, featuring a guided meditation session, reformer Pilates class and a contrast therapy session with access to the venue's Finnish sauna and cold plunge pools. Guests will also receive a free Pilates outfit, including grip socks, from Lululemon. For more invites to events like this one, join Access today. It’s only $12 a month.