Are You Setting Your Fitness Goals Correctly?

Every single time the New year approaches, most people feel a sense of renewed hope and a burst of motivation. It feels like they’re going to have a brand-new start and anything they’ve always wanted is within reach and possible.

They set ambitious New Year resolutions and exciting goals. The most common New Year’s resolution is to get fit and healthy. Yet, if you looked around, most people are neither fit nor are they specimens of good health.

So, what gives?

If being healthy is the most popular New Year’s resolution, why are so many people overweight and unhealthy?

The answer boils down to one simple answer – incorrect goal setting.

Let’s see how you should set your fitness goals.

• What’s your current state?

For starters, you need to analyze your current state of health. If you have weak knees and arthritis, aiming to be a champion Crossfitter is not going to be a smart goal to set. While your goals can be ambitious, they must be practical in the short run.

To go from zero to hero sounds cool, but you’ll be setting yourself up for a fall if your goals are overambitious. A woman who is 50 pounds overweight would be better off aiming to lose 2 to 4 pounds a week rather than setting a goal of trying to fit into a skimpy bikini is 3 weeks.

When the goal is too formidable, it’s easy to lose hope when results don’t come as fast as you expect. This is the biggest reason why most people throw in the towel. Avoid it at all cost.

• Give yourself enough time

Too many people overestimate what they can achieve in a day and underestimate what they can do in 3 months to a year.

If you’ve led a sedentary lifestyle for years, trying to lose 20 pounds in 2 weeks is NOT going to happen. When you set your fitness goals, you must allow sufficient time for your body to adapt and show results.

It takes about 3 weeks or so for your body to develop stamina. It takes a few months for you to build visible muscle size and see strength gains.

If you set a deadline that’s too short, you’ll feel like a failure if you don’t meet your goals within that time. Your body cannot be rushed and works at its own pace. You can encourage it to hasten the process, but it still works slowly for the most part.

• Don’t do what you hate

Expecting willpower and discipline to get you all the way to the end is not practical. Very often, people believe that they need to do activities they hate engaging in just to see results. Nothing could be further from the truth.

You don’t need run daily to improve your stamina. Find a cardio activity you enjoy doing. It could be cycling, swimming, the rowing machine or even kickboxing classes. Do what you love and you’ll stick to your goals all the way to the end.

To conclude, just know that when you’re setting your fitness goals, it can be exciting to visualize yourself looking ripped and muscular or lean and sexy. These are the end goals in the distant future.

But when planning, you should make short term, achievable goals that push you a little but don’t wipe you out and leave you feeling demotivated. Trying to lose 2 or 3 pounds a week is sensible. 

Trying to lose 10 pounds in one week will make you feel like you’ve failed if you only lose 4. You’ll believe that what you’re doing is not working and you’ll give up. Most people do.

Don’t make that mistake. Consistency will get you to the end. Make short term goals and smash them. Then make new ones and achieve those too. Goal setting, just like fitness, is a never-ending process and a fun one, if you do it right.

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