What should our goals look like? – follow the crowd or look at the outcomes we want in ourselves and set goals around them?
Having relevant goals would seem like a no brainer, sometimes though, we find ourselves pondering what they should be. How do we find goals that are relevant and scaled for ourselves?
Think of a grey animal – elephant?
Think of how to make a positive impact for next week – slightly more taxing on the brain?
When exploring fitness, it can be the same, just it has many more levels to it.
I want to tone up, ok does that mean look like we did 10 years ago or add muscle to look athletic or something else?
I want to be able to run
I want to be able to lift weights
I want to be flexible
On the face of it, these are goals, our objective is to expand these and make the goal a relevant one and specific one at that.
I want to be able to run:
Distance, speed, activity type, duration and how long do we have to reach this are all of the questions that ideally we cover off.
Not having answers to these is absolutely fine! – we can fill in the gaps as we need to, or as we learn more about ourselves.
Let’s dissect this a little, and imagine that we can run but are not sure of how far or fast we can run at the moment. We will also rule out running around for fun (with peers/children etc) I cannot note just how good a goal this is though – just a little difficult to surmise in this context.
So would we like to enter a race or just compete against ourselves?
We want to compete against ourselves – cool
What’s the overall distance goal – 5K to start, this is a wise starting distance….
How are we going to measure ourselves – speed over the distance – sub 35 minutes
When would we like to complete it by – 4 months, good time frame
So in 4 months time I would like to be able to run a 5K on my route within 35 minutes.
If we were to be starting out, the ‘within timeframe’ can just be dropped, once we have completed it we can then re-visit and choose a time (if we wanted to stay at 5k) and reframe the goal. Likewise we could choose to use that time and predict (plenty of online calculators for running) a 10k time, as an example.
Goals will always evolve and we need to be flexible with other things happening in our lives, don’t be afraid to change the goal posts if needed, the goal only disappears if we stop working towards it!
Lifting weight, one of the simplest yet complicated goals….
Lifting more is something that always brings lot’s of opinions (even just lifting weights in general!),
5 reps at 100kg = 500kg
10 reps at 50kg = 500kg
Same overall weight, very different methodologies and outcomes.
Do we want to be able to continuously apply force through a muscle group or have one complete effort?
When we search for an outcome as our goal, it becomes a little easier to break it down and apply some logical steps.
Need help with setting goals? Chat to one of the team here at SF info@spikefitness.co.uk or 07597215652.