Achieve Your Health and Fitness Goals
Achieve Your Health and Fitness Goals
What would Health and Fitness goals would you like to achieve this year?
We all tend to set goals or make new year’s resolutions at the start the year. But how many people actually achieve their goals?
Many people fail at the first hurdle – they overcommit, lose motivation, allow life to get in the way.
This can be down to numerous reasons like they haven’t set SMART goals, they don’t really want it enough, they don’t like getting out of their comfort zone, their limiting beliefs get in the way.
What can we do to help us set goals that we can achieve?
Firstly you need be clear with what you want to achieve and why!
Without a purpose it’s so easy to lose motivation.
For example one of my personal goals this year is to lose 9lbs before the end of May. One of my reasons for wanting this is that my stepdaughter is getting married in June and I want to feel my best for the day.
Another reason is we’re going on holiday abroad at the end of May. First one in years, so I want to feel good in a bikini.
The last reason is, it’s my ideal weight that my body prefers to be around. This is when I feel great in my clothes, have more energy, feel fitter and healthier.
You can see from my reasons above that I have a clear purpose on what I want and why I want to achieve my goal. Not just one reason, but several.
Do you think that I might find it easier to achieve my goal then if I just randomly wanted to lose weight for no particular reason?.
The next thing to consider is can this be measured?
What I mean by that is you need to be able to see if you are heading in the right direction, are you making progress? Are you getting nearer to the end goal?
Can you see week by week, month by month that things are changing for the better?
Going back to my example I’m using weight as a measurement. I know the end result is 9lbs so if I see the scales coming down at regular intervals this is going to motivate me to continue.
If you wanted to save money for a holiday or special occasion. You would need a target amount (end result). You would also want to be seeing that your savings were increasing over the period, to keep you motivated to save and not spend unnecessarily.
If your goal was to increase your fitness levels you’d have to set yourself a target eg walk 5 miles easily, run 10k etc. Then break it down and build up over the period of time you had chosen to achieve this goal.
This links nicely into setting a Time Frame. You would need to set a time frame on when you want to achieve your goals to keep you on track and to have something to aim towards. This must be realistic and achievable.
There’s nothing worse than setting yourself an unrealistic goal over a short period of time that you have no hope in achieving. This just leads to de-motivation and beating yourself up.
I used to get this time and time again in my job as a Personal Trainer.
Clients would come to me with a goal like “I want to walk the 3 Peaks in 5 weeks time.”
So my first questions would be – “How long are your current walks” and “How often are you getting out walking”
Now if their reply was something like “I go out for a walk with the kids at the weekend a couple of times a week, around 30-40mins”
Do you think it’s a practical timeframe to want to go from 2miles to 22 miles, up some really steep climbs in 5 week’s?
No definitely not, unless they told me they also went fell running several times a week 60-90mins at a time.
Another favourite of mine was “I want to lose a stone in weight”.
My question would be “When would you like to achieve this goal”
Replies used to be “2-3 week’s in time for my holiday”
Realistic? Definitely not when the average weight loss is around 1-2lbs a week following a great exercise and diet plan.
In summary before setting your health and fitness goals consider the following:
Are they:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic
Time Framed
Using this system and writing your goals down will make your goals much more achievable!
Good luck with planning and achieving your New Year Goals