It’s very important in my opinion to have goals in fitness. If you don’t set goals for yourself then you’ll struggle to find the motivation week in, week out to keep on finding time to work out (and to stick to your diet plan).
Deadlines are great. Especially with fitness - they get you motivated and give you a prize at the end of it.
- Getting a six pack in 16 weeks
- Adding an inch to your biceps in 30 days
- Being able to run a marathon after 3 months training
These are all examples of deadlines. The problem is that a lot of the times we set deadlines for ourselves we end up getting discouraged half way through and give up before we ever get there. Losing 5kg in 3 months can be a pretty reasonable goal if you are overweight, but most who have tried to do this usually hear the swishing sound the deadline makes as it goes past and are no where near where they want to be.
1. Master your weekly fitness ‘to do’ list so that you keep working on your goal
If you continually meet weekly goals you set for yourself then you’ll find it much easier to achieve your overall goal. Give yourself a weekly ‘to do’ fitness list and work to achieve it. If you find it too hard then make the list shorter. The important thing to do is optimise these mini one-week deadlines so that you are able to end each week being able to say you’ve achieved all you wanted to achieve.
2. Have reasonable expectations
So let’s say you are going to set small goals to achieve each week. My advice is to have some easy weeks, and some hard weeks. In fact it’s probably even better to cycle through an easy week, medium week and then a hard week. Having an easy week after the hard week will allow your body time to recover.
The hard weeks will also act as important tests to see how well you’re set to achieving the deadline you’ve given yourself.
3. Don’t rest on your laurels but don’t continually overextend yourself by doing more than you planned to do each week.
Sometimes we’ll find that we easily meet the goals we set for ourselves on a certain week. The temptation is to go on and accomplish a whole lot more that week. Now I’m not against extra workouts and exercise, but we have to realise that we’re in this for the long haul. We’re not going to achieve what we want if we blow ourselves out one week and then have to spend the next week in recovery mode.
You may not agree with this point, but I encourage you to try it out. You see as you stick to the goals that you’ve set per week you’ll start to treat these small goals more seriously rather than something that would be “nice to achieve” it becomes just as important as the overall deadline you’ve given yourself.
My final advice is not to get too down if you fail to meet your mini-deadlines (or even your overall deadline). Review what you did right, consider what mistakes you made, give yourself a 1 week holiday and then try again. After all, you can only be successful if you try again and again. There’s not too much luck involved in fitness.
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