Goal Setting – Why We Should
- Jay Homewood
- Oct 21, 2024
- 4 min read
People embark upon a training routine for many different reasons. Perhaps you want to lose weight, get stronger or improve your overall health and fitness. To achieve results, regardless of your motivations, consistency is key. Without consistency, it is all too easy to get frustrated by a lack of progress or not understand why you aren’t progressing the way that you want to be. The best way to ensure that you remain consistent in your training is to set goals. By setting goals, you are outlining a realistic roadmap to the results you want that will keep you on track, motivated and able to succeed.
Breaking down your goals
Every person has different reasons for wanting to improve, and every person will have a different journey to reach their ultimate goal. Maybe your goal is to get stronger, run a marathon or improve your flexibility.
Once you have identified what your overarching goal is, the next step is to break this down into more manageable goals. You must choose goals that are achievable, realistic and that support your main goal. This is so important as it provides you with the roadmap to your end goal, gives you the motivation to stay on track and gives each workout a purpose to help you achieve the results that you want. Breaking down your goal into smaller achievements will also prevent you from feeling too overwhelmed by a difficult goal. For example, planning to lose 50 pounds might feel overwhelming, but breaking that goal down into ‘I want to lose 5 pounds a month for ten months’ will feel more achievable and so you are more likely to stay on track, and succeeding at the smaller milestones will motivate and inspire you to keep going.
SMART Goals
Your goals should be SMART – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely. This is a very efficient tool to use as it helps you identify goals that are achievable and will encourage you to succeed by keeping you motivated and on track. If you set an unrealistic goal or a goal that is not specific, measurable or realistic it’s easy to go off track, become demotivated or give up altogether. Setting goals that follow the SMART rule will set you up for success.
For example, let’s say your overall goal is to get stronger. This is not a specific goal and so it is easy to give up or even to claim that you succeeded after a minor improvement in your strength. A more specific goal would be ‘I want to increase the amount I can deadlift from 150% of my body weight to 160% of my body weight.’ This can be measured by the increase in the weight you are deadlifting as you move towards that goal. The weight you want to deadlift should be a realistic increase of what you can currently do, within a realistic timeframe. Setting vague or unrealistic goals means you are setting yourself up for failure and by not meeting your targets, you can find yourself demotivated. Alternatively, without a proper training plan, you could end up pushing yourself too hard and could injure yourself and not be able to continue with your training plan.
By not setting up a timeframe and a deadline for when you achieve your goal, you may find yourself constantly pushing the goalpost back. An example of this could be ‘I want to lose 10 pounds.’ It is important to have a deadline for achieving your goal so that you can schedule your training plan effectively. A better goal would be ‘I want to lose 10 pounds within three months.’ With this deadline, you are less likely to skip a workout as you have a timeframe to achieve your goal in and this makes every workout essential.
Set positive goals
Set yourself goals that are motivating and supportive, as opposed to negative goals or overly restrictive goals. If you are too strict, it can be easy to feel demotivated if you slip up or punish yourself for not sticking to your rules. Your goals may need to be adjusted as you progress, and that is fine. It is not a sign of failure to adjust your goals, as long as you don’t give up at the first hurdle.
Mindset
Setting goals helps you build an overall mentality of success and self-improvement. By setting goals, you are focusing on building a positive mental attitude to help you reach those goals. Sticking to your goals increases your perseverance, dedication and positivity. It’s easy to convince yourself to skip a workout if you don’t have a clear goal and an achievable route to meet that goal, and it’s easy to convince yourself that you’re on track when you might be falling behind. Once you start hitting those milestones in your plan, you’ll see a huge benefit to your mindset as you start to see how reachable your goals are.
More efficient workouts
By setting goals that have meaning to you, you can create an efficient training plan that is focused on and built around your goals and that will help you improve in the area that you have chosen. Many people go to the gym or exercise without setting goals and may find they are not improving because they have not pushed themselves or have repeated the same exercises at the same difficulty over and over again. To improve, we have to push ourselves out of our comfort zone and setting goals will allow us to find the motivation and energy to do this, and each workout will be designed to help you reach that end goal.
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