Setting fitness goals is not about attaining the perfect body as much as it is about personal growth. When you set SMART fitness goals, you will have to do your best in order to attain those goals. This is why it’s necessary that you read and learn about fitness and how you can achieve your dreams.
If you want a perfect body, do it for fitness but also for the person you will become. Be determined and relentless to achieve your goals.
How do you set SMART fitness goals? Read this guide to find out.
1. Reflect Upon What You Want
The only reasonable way to decide what you want in the future and how you’ll get it is to determine how you feel about yourself right now.
Are you physically fit? Are you happy with your body? Take a moment, think through and as you write your current situation ask yourself if you approve the content you have just written.
What’s the purpose of this evaluation?
First, it’s an objective way to look at your fitness state and your pursuit of fitness goals. Second, it gives you a clear picture of the gap between your current state and your goal. Both act as a baseline. Don’t be in a hurry to evaluate your fitness status. This report will help you appreciate how much ground you’re gaining.
2. Are Your Goals Defined?
You need to set your goals in your fitness plan. This will make your fitness goals real and tangible. This will help you ‘see’ what needs to be done. As you write your goals, also remember to make an action plan to help you attain your goals.
Write the individual steps, and then cross each one off as you attain it. This will help you appreciate the ground covered. This is particularly important if your fitness goal is huge and demanding, or long term.
3. Set Goals That Will Keep You Motivated
When you set your fitness goals, it’s important to set goals that will motivate you. How do you tell if the goals are important or not?? Important goals are the ones that will add value to your life once you have achieved them. If you find that you have little or no interest in the outcome of your fitness goals, you will have low motivation to achieve them.
Do your goals resound to the high priorities in your life? Lack of focus will make you end up with many irrelevant fitness goals. To achieve your goals, you need to be convinced there is urgency. When there is no sense of urgency, you risk procrastinating what you need to do to realize your goals.
What happens when you’re not motivated to achieve your goals? There is a high chance you’ll feel frustrated and disappointed with yourself. Set goals that will make you feel like an achiever and not a person who says “I can’t be successful at anything.”
4. Is Your Fitness Goals SMART?
What is SMART fitness goal? SMART stands for: specific, measurable, realistic and time-based. SMART goal setting will help give you the demonstrable path towards your objectives, with clear steps and estimation of goal’s achievability. SMART goals bring your dreams closer to reality.
To make your fitness goals SMART, you need to conform to the following criteria:
Specific Goals
First thing, you must come up with is a very specific fitness goal. Think about what your fitness mission is set to accomplish, what you need to attain your goals and why fitness is important to you. It’s not enough to vaguely claim that you want to lose weight.’’ You need to provide details and be as specific as possible.
Some people set vague goals when it comes to fitness. They want to ‘stay open’. This is setting yourself up for failure. If you want to lose weight or gain muscles, be specific on how many pounds you want to lose and how much muscle mass you want to gain.
Would you like to lose half an inch around your waist? What are your reasons for setting your fitness goal?
Measurable Goals
Are your goals measurable? How do you know if you’re on the right track? If you establish a way of measuring your fitness goal, then you’ll be able to track your progress.
How will you know when you’ve reached your goal?
If your goals don’t involve muscle building or weight loss but performance improvement, you’ll need different parameters to measure your results. For instance, as a swimmer, endurance athlete or a runner, you may need to buy a stopwatch. Compare your results with your goal.
You also need to write down your results so that you can compare where you started with your current state.
Achievable Goals
How will you attain your goals? Let’s say, you want to lose 20 pounds: How will you make that happen? What specific steps will you take to attain this goal?
Do you believe that you will achieve the fitness goal that you set for yourself? Now, sometimes you can set a goal that will frighten you. That’s normal. However, you need to find ways of overcoming the ‘impossible’ mindset.
Set fitness goals that excite you. Boring goals are poor motivators especially if you’re looking forward to changing your body.
Realistic Goals
If you don’t set realistic goals, you’re likely to end up frustrated and stressed. It won’t take long for anxiety to build and eventually you will be drained. Unrealistic goals will discourage you from taking the first step. If you want to achieve your goals, it’s necessary to be realistic.
Here are two key points to remember when creating achievable fitness goals:
- Muscle Mass: Depending on gender, training schedule, previous muscle building experience, and diet, you can add one or two pounds a month.
- Weight Loss: Depending on your current weight, genetics, lifestyle, and gender, it’s possible to lose a pound or two weekly.
Time-Based Goals
Do you have a target date? Are you pursuing fitness with the competition or an event in mind? Setting a deadline will significantly boost your motivation and focus. Challenge yourself to set new records and see how you can perform under pressure.
It’s good to have a timeline but you need to be realistic. You need to give yourself ample time to achieve your goals.
5. Stick to Your SMART GOALS
You shouldn’t regard goal setting as a means to an end. Goal setting is a continuous activity that needs internal reminders to keep yourself on the right path.
Your end goal may remain the same over a long period, but there might be some changes regarding your action plans, Make sure you continue to attach high necessity, relevance and value to your fitness goals.
6. Do You Have a Role Model?
One of the best ways to attain fitness goals is to find people that have already achieved what you want to do. Learn what these people did and you can follow their footsteps. You can reinvent the wheel if you want, but what’s the point if someone before you is a role model?
However, this doesn’t mean you should follow your role models blindly. Just pick what seems right, and make a much faster step than someone who is learning everything from scratch.
7. Visualization
Visualization has proven to be an effective way of improving performance in fitness. It will change your behavior and help you to achieve big goals. When you imagine having that dream body, you will feel happy and your unconscious mind will know exactly what you want.
You should visualize every day before exercise. Imagine you have achieved your fitness goals, and you will start enjoying the feeling of greatness coming from within.
8. Affirmation
Have you heard of affirmations before? A lot of negative things have been said about affirmations but these negative things don’t change the fact that affirmation remains effective. However, you don’t have to do anything that doesn’t feel right to you.
For example, if you have a goal of running 2 miles every morning, your affirmation might be “I am able to easily run 2 miles every day”.
You keep repeating this information to yourself every day. But repeating alone is not enough – you need to see the results. Do you know why some people say affirmations don’t work for them? They let their doubts take over.
What does it mean to let your ‘doubts take over’? This is when your mind tells you stuff like “Yeah right, you will never attain that body shape. After all, you don’t deserve it”. Such a thought instantly kills the power of your affirmation.
9. Believe in Yourself
You need to believe in yourself and your ability to attain your fitness goals. Naturally, you can start to realize that you have already attained different goals in your life? What does that tell you? You already possess superior qualities that make you an achiever.
The only barrier standing between you and your physical fitness is you. Have you seen babies trying to walk? They fall, then immediately stand up.
Take Action to Achieve SMART Fitness Goals
While the above tips are important towards achieving your SMART fitness goals, you also need to take action. The earlier you take action, the faster you will attain your goals. It may seem difficult at first, but as you start taking steps, the fog will clear.
Check out our blog post to learn more about health and fitness.