Top Tips For Setting Realistic, Achievable Fitness Goals
A personal trainer is there to help you achieve the best version of yourself, not only through training but also diet, accountability and more holistic support. We provide the steps, the motivation and the advice you need, but the rest is up to you.
One of the most difficult parts of a fitness plan, however, is the very start; establishing your fitness goals and setting up a training regimen to fit your needs, your lifestyle and the ambitions you have for your body.
Your fitness goals will take many different shapes, but the importance of goal setting is often understated, and it is vital that you choose the right target to hit when you start your fitness journey, and alter it to meet your changing body and priorities.
With that in mind, there are some top tips for setting fitness goals that will help you be the best version of yourself rather than demotivate you.
Choose The Right Type Of Goals
Everyone has different expectations and goals when it comes to fitness, whether that is to build muscle mass, lose weight or build up their cardio and energy levels to help them achieve what they want to achieve.
However, even beyond these overarching goals, there are different types of goals you can set, and even when they point to a similar overall outcome, they can have a fundamentally distinct effect on your motivation and your overall outcomes.
In general, there are three types of athletic goals:
Outcome goals, such as a target weight or competition success.
Performance goals, where you want to reach a specific standard, such as a certain number of reps, or achieve a certain time in a running race.
Process goals, such as training a certain number of days a week, making sure you eat within your calorie limit, maintaining proper form with exercises or making sure you eat certain types of meals a week.
As the study above shows, process goals have the most positive effect on your motivation because they are entirely within your control, whilst performance goals and especially outcome goals rely on a range of variables.
A personal trainer can help you measure, monitor and tick off all of your goals, giving you success after success that you can build up to meet your goals.
Keep Them SMART
Setting a goal is meaningless if it is impossible for you to meet, so a guide that is used in many industries is to make sure all of your goals are SMART:
Specific, focused on one particular target area.
Measurable, something that you can count and tally.
Achievable, ambitious but not impossible.
Relevant to your overall fitness outcomes.
Time-bound, which, with a PT, typically means it is measured on a daily or weekly basis.
There are studies that suggest that goal setting for fitness using the SMART criteria has a greater effect than exercise would for its own sake.
Focus On Progress Rather Than Success
Successful exercise routines will take into account that everyone will have different readiness levels each day, and there won’t be linear progress and success each week.
If you miss a goal, as long as you are still moving forward and do not lose motivation, you are still succeeding, and a PT will provide accountability, but not necessarily in a way that will affect your focus.