Goals: "If you're failing to plan, you're planning to fail!"

Many of you will immediately skip over this article based on the title. Yes, we’ve all heard the goal setting lectures before, but I wanted to put down some of my thoughts about goals setting specifically as they apply to health and fitness. I’ve learned a thing or two over the years that just about anyone might find useful.

First, is the ABSOLUTE necessity of having both long and short term goals as they apply to your health and fitness! This would seem like a no-brainer, but you don’t know how many times I’ve heard clients say “I’ve achieved the goals I came here to achieve, so now I just want to work out and not worry about goals.” This usually means they also don’t want to bother with the bi-monthly fitness evaluation either. In almost every case, within six months they’ve backslid significantly.

You’re either moving forward or moving backwards. If you don’t have a fitness goal, no matter how minor, and you’re not continuing to monitor your fitness level, I can almost assure you that your overall fitness level will decrease.

I’ve even seen it in myself: I know I don’t have the talent to be a professional athlete, I feel terrible if I’m much below 8 percent body fat, and every time I try to up my bench-press, deadlift or squat much beyond my current level, I end up hurting myself (from overreaching and dumb errors on my part, not the exercises themselves). So every once in a while I catch myself without any real goals. I’m happy with my fitness level, I’m getting positive comments from others, I’m strong, healthy, and fit.

Then it happens, I catch myself just going through the motions. My workouts get lazy, and my diet deteriorates. Pretty soon I’m looking at myself in the mirror and not liking what I see. That’s when I have to reset my goals and get back on track.

It should go without saying that goals have to be realistic. Deciding that your goal is to lose 50 lbs before your trip to Cancun in two months is just setting yourself up for failure. Some people say you need to reach for the moon in order to accomplish anything, but I feel that reaching for the moon only works if you’re NASA. If you're anyone else, you need to set realistic goals.

You also need to make sure you don’t set conflicting goals: A beginner may put on some muscle while they are losing fat but you’ll have much better luck if you just try for one goal at a time. Also, watch the timing of your goals. Setting a realistic weight loss goal around a trip to the beach is a great idea, but trying to continue to lose weight while on that Caribbean cruise may be a bit unrealistic. A more realistic goal may be to limit your total weight gain to only a pound, since you know you’re not going to be able to resist the buffets and margaritas.

It often helps to have long, medium and short term goals. What the sports performance world calls macro, messo and micro cycles. For an athlete, a long term goal or macro cycle might be winning a gold at the Olympics in two years. For you it might be getting into the same shape as you were when you were 20. An athlete might have a medium term goal of improving his anaerobic capacity, and you might have the same goal but with the intent of upping the amount of work you can do in every workout, thereby increasing long term fat loss. A short term or micro cycle for an athlete might be a two week workout plan that would change every two weeks and your short term goal might also be completing the two week workout/nutrition plan that will be necessary to move you towards the weight loss.

Many times our clients are just dealing with medium and long term goals while the trainer takes care of the short term plans, but it really does help to know “what am I doing this week?”, “what easily foreseeable goal do I have for the next month or two?”, and finally, “where do I see myself in two years?”

What if you really are happy with your fitness level? To be honest, I find that hard to believe. Almost all of us have something we’d like to improve. Or maybe it’s something you always wanted to be able to do, but never could. Like dunking a basketball or doing 10 chin-ups. Maybe you’re pretty happy with the way you look but you’ve always wanted more defined abs, or better calves. These may seem like minor or silly goals, but as long as you actually HAVE a goal at all, your workouts will be much more motivated.

Last summer, I noticed that photos of myself in a swimsuit looked slightly less fit than the year before. Many people would say “I’m in my 40’s, I can’t expect to look this way forever”, but instead, I set a goal of doing a photo shoot this summer, where I was determined to look better than ever. It may sound narcissistic, but the fact is, the thought of the upcoming photo shoot energized my workouts for months. I not only look better than ever, but also feel more physically fit in general than I have in years.

There’s a reason one of the first questions I ask someone when I talk to them about fitness is “What are your goals?” It may be cliché, but if “You’re failing to plan, you’re planning to fail!”

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