Professional athletes, successful business people and all top achievers set goals. Setting goals can help you focus your time and energy by giving you short term motivation and long-term vision.
There is a variety of fitness goals to choose from in the gym and outside. Defining your fitness goals before you start is important to focus on the right things, fuel your ambition and hold yourself accountable.
In the fitness world, it is important to know what you want to gain from training. People with different goals will have different training methods, intervals and intensities. In essence, you cannot expect a bodybuilder to get competition ready by following a swimmers training program.
Below are some typical fitness goals. Your goals might be a variation of these or even some sort of combination, and that’s ok. The important part is that you define your goals and start working toward them in a smart way.
Training for health
Some people train for no other reason than to keep their body healthy and in optimum condition.
It is a well-known fact that exercising is good for your general health. In fact, the number of associated benefits is much too long to list here.
However, training just to be healthy is one of the hardest fitness goals to set and uphold. It can be challenging to stay motivated because it is sometimes difficult to find quantifiable goals.
Powerlifting/Weightlifting
Both powerlifting and weightlifting comprise of lifting as much weight as possible in different lifts. Powerlifting features the bench press, deadlift and squat while weightlifting includes the clean and jerk and the snatch. All of these lifts are used extensively in general strength training and conditioning due to their widely accepted ability to develop an individual’s power and strength.
The main difference between these sports is the manner in which they execute their lifts. Weightlifters utilize momentum to do their movements explosively and powerfully. It also requires an immense amount of technique. Powerlifters, on the other hand, use pure strength but little explosive power to lift incredibly heavy weights.
Elite weightlifters and powerlifters are amongst the most powerful and strongest people in the world.
Training for sports
Professional athletes of all types engage in some variation of strength and power training to enhance their performance. However, the strength training must be specific to the demands of an individual’s sport. In other words, a football player will not benefit from a training program that has been designed for a swimmer and vice versa.
Therefore, athletes must train movements specific to the demands of the sport they participate in. An important guideline for sports athletes is training movements, not muscles. Movement patterns that are normally seen in sport include rotation, push, pull, acceleration, deceleration and the squat.
Bodybuilding training
The art of bodybuilding is purely cosmetic. The primary goal is to maximize muscle mass and minimize body fat. As a result, participants in the highest level of competition provide extraordinary visuals.
There are some who find huge biceps and bulging veins unappealing. However, on the positive side, the sport has inspired countless people to take up strength training and improve their health.
Bodybuilders focus on isolating muscle groups in resistance training to promote hypertrophy. Any gain in strength and power is merely a by-product of the resistance training.
Training to look fit
Not everyone wants to look like a professional bodybuilder. Training to look fit is very popular nowadays. You may only want to look a little better by losing fat and gaining a bit of muscle.
That fit look is usually achieved by some combination of strength training and endurance training. A lot of people achieve this goal by taking part in some high-intensity training regime like CrossFit or boxing.
Be S.M.A.R.T.E.R. about your goals
Specific – When you choose your goals, you have to be as specific as possible. That means that you don’t just decide your goal is to lose weight, you have to be specific about how much weight you want to lose – Make it quantifiable.
Your mind is a tricky thing, It is very easy for your mind to change goals if it was not concrete in the first place. When the goal is obscure you will lose motivation especially when these goals are hard to obtain.
Meaningful – This is the “why” of your goal. The reason for your goals should be something important. Before you start you have to be real about why you want to achieve your goal.
When your goal has a deep enough meaning, you will stay motivated and do whatever it takes to achieve them – even when the going gets tough.
Achievable – Setting the difficulty of goals can be tricky. It needs to be realistic yet not to easy.
Setting a goal that is nearly unattainable will make you lose motivation as well as demoralize you completely. However, goals should not be so easy that it does not require any effort or work from your side.
Building that all-important momentum by achieving short term milestones of the right difficulty is the key to progressively building up confidence.
Relevant – Your goals should be relevant to your own life. This means that you should evaluate what is important to you and make sure that your goals are aligned to the same.
Copying someone else’s goals because you think they are cool is not wise. If a goal contradicts one of your core values, then you are likely to get frustrated and give up on that goal.
Time-bound – Put down the exact date when you want to achieve your goals. When you make goals time-bound, tracking performance regularly allows you to hold yourself accountable.
You should be able to see how much closer you are to achieving your goals and how much time you have left to achieve them throughout the process.
Try breaking up long term goals (longer than 1 year) into smaller short-term goals (like every 3 months) to make sure that you keep on track. For example, if you want to increase your one-rep maximum in the bench press by 40 pounds in the next 8 months, then break it up into 10 pounds every 2 months.
Evaluate –Long -term goals and even short- term goals can easily be ignored if you don’t evaluate them on a regular basis. Evaluating your goals and progress on a regular basis will make you much more likely to achieve them.
Setting up a system to evaluate your goals is recommended. Something as simple as evaluating after a fixed time or maybe after every 5 pounds of weight loss can be very effective.
Readjust – Readjusting while trying to achieve your goals is the key to making progress towards success. Readjusting a goal does not mean you throw it out the window and start over. Rather, it is small adjustments to realign yourself and make sure you focus on the right things.
That Is why constant evaluation is so important. You need to evaluate your progress and then readjust your path constantly to stay on track.
