How to Reach Your Fitness Goals
Taking the first steps towards reaching your fitness goals can be both an exciting and intimidating process. Why? For starters, fitness goals often involve physical discomfort, long-term dedication, and hard work. That being said, many people are successful in achieving their fitness goals. The process starts by asking yourself the following:
1. What exactly are your fitness goals?
2. Where are you right now relative to those goals?
3. What is your plan to get yourself there?
Let’s explore these questions in more detail below…
1. What Are Your Fitness Goals?
Take a moment to reflect on this – what exactly is the goal that you’re trying to reach? Are you trying to get stronger? Increase mobility? Improve your balance? Have more energy at work or for travelling around the world? Maybe it’s a combination of all the above.
Even deeper than these questions – why are you pursuing this? Is there something inside of you that’s driving the pursuit of this goal? Or is there pressure coming from somewhere, or someone else?
Whatever your goal is, be sure to keep that front and center. As the world-renowned coach Dan John once said, “The goal is to keep the goal the goal.”
Having a goal gives you a target to aim for, which can help you move to the next question…
2. Where Are You Right Now Relative to Your Goals?
If you look at your goals as a destination at the end of a road trip, you must understand where you currently are relative to that destination.
For example, maybe your fitness goal involves running 1.5 miles in under 12 minutes, so knowing what your current 1.5-mile run time is would give you a baseline run time to improve. This can be done for mobility, strength, different types of fitness goals (e.g., rowing, biking, swimming), and other more lifestyle-centered goals, such as improving your sleep quality or eating more nutritious foods.
3. Create a Plan to Take You Forward
Just like with planning a road trip, once you understand the direction you’re trying to go and where you’re starting from, you can begin to choose your route.
Going back to the previous example with running and having a baseline 1.5-mile run time, now you can begin to create a plan to move the needle forward. If you’re not running on a regular basis, this could involve looking at your weekly schedule and blocking off a few times each week to focus on running improvement. Because our bodies don’t adapt overnight, this would require you to stick with your plan for a few weeks, months, or even years, depending on how far away from your goal you are.
The tricky part is knowing how to progress and adjust training when roadblocks arise – and with life being what it is, they WILL come up. A quality plan also factors in things outside of fitness that can affect your rate of progress. Food, sleep, and stress can all affect your training, as well as your ability to stick with and enjoy the process overall.
In sum, if you’re working on achieving your fitness goals and need help with accountability or developing a plan, feel free to reach out and book a free consult here.