Whatever you have committed yourself to this year or are thinking of committing yourself to let me give you 3 tips to setting and achieving your fitness (or other) goals this year.
#1. Be specific! Being vague in your goals only leaves room for excuses and justification when it comes time to assess progress. How can success be measured when there are no specific markers by which to measure them against?
For example your goal for 2013 : Get in Shape and lose weight
Well that is great you want to get in shape and lose weight but be specific, what does "in shape" mean to you ??? How much weight do you need to lose? Instead of saying get in shape define what that means, say "I want to be able to exercise for 30 minutes without a break, or I want to be able to RUN 6 miles or do 200 squats or fit into a size 8."
Maybe your goal is " Eat healthy"
Same thing, what does eat healthy mean to you. Instead try saying "I am going to eat 5 servings of fruits and veggies a day and set a carb and fat limit on my diet." like "I will not exceed x grams of fat in my daily diet." Or I will not consume refined sugars more than once a week. You know what your body needs and what it responds to, so you determine what is a good idea but BE SPECIFIC!
While on this subject I want to say I am not a fan of setting weight loss goals like "I want to lose 10 pounds". Why? Well if you've read my previous article Foe or Friend, When to Ignore the Sclae, I talk about the fact that when we exercise and specifically doing activity like the workouts here at FAHM we are building muscle. Often what happens, especially at first when someone who is doing muscle building exercises, is fat is converted to muscle. Contrary to popular belief muscle does not weight more than fat! 5 pounds of muscle weighs the same as 5 pounds of fat! However 5 pounds of muscle will take up far less space than 5 pounds of fat, that is why I like to measure "weight loss" not by the numbers on the scale but rather by inches or how my clothes fit. Because lets be real here, strong firm curves not only look better but are better for your health than what I like to call "skinny flabby". Skinny flabby is what happens when you just diet and maybe run here and there but the weight comes off by just losing fat. What you are left with is less fat, which don't get me wrong is a good thing, but you still have fat and if you have not built muscle then keeping the pounds off can become difficult. How many of you out there have yo-yo'ed around with your weight? Most of us do to an extent but I will tell you the more muscle you have the less you will see your weight yo-yo because muscle is in charge of your metabolism and if you've got a lot then your metabolism can handle the occasional ice cream sundae fest, or cookie attack or full out week of binge eating (not that I recommend any of that but lets face it, it happens sometimes) You will see that the more muscle you have the less time your body needs to recover after a vacation from healthy eating.
#2. Be reasonable when setting goals and keep them simple. The entire point of a goal is to achieve something new or desirable, which often means it is difficult or takes a good amount of effort, so it doesn't make much sense to set a goal that can easily be obtained and the other end of the spectrum can be counter productive as well. If you are currently over weight by 50 lbs and can't jog for more than 30 seconds than setting a goal to run a marathon and look like a rock star in 6 months is probably a bit steep and will often lead to disappointment which usually leads to complete abandonment of that goal. Can you lose 50 lbs and train to run a marathon in 6 months, sure it can be done but how realistic or reasonable is that in real life. Most of us have jobs and other obligations and we can not dedicate every hour to exercise and training. So when setting your goals make sure it is something that works with the limitations of your lifestyle. Most resolutions are abandoned and forgotten by March. Why? Because people hit a few speed bumps along the way or have not made enough progress to see results and they then loose their drive to achieve. No one likes feeling like a failure but the only time in life you will be a failure is when you GIVE UP so DO NOT GIVE UP!!!!
#3. Make you goal fun or exciting in some way. A goal like getting every room in my house organized doesn't sound like much fun and even though everything doesn't have to be fun it sure helps get things accomplished. For those of you who have kids you will notice that putting some music on while doing chores or reinventing the dreaded chore of picking up the room into some sort of game typically brings better results or at least fewer complaints from your children. And aren't we all still kids at heart, don't we like to find the fun in things still? So if I am going to organize every room in my house maybe to make it fun I will say I am going to find a new and inventive way to accomplish that for each room via Pinterest! Cause we all know Pinterest has plenty of handy dandy niffty ideas and if your the crafty type being inventive with your organization makes it fun instead of mundane. So find out what equals fun or excitement in your life and try and find a way to implement that into how you accomplish your goals. You will not only find you actually achieve those New Year resolutions but you had a great time doing it and it was less difficult than you thought.
Now here is your bonus tip. I'm sure everyone has heard this one but it is worth repeating because it is crucial to being successful with your goals, ready...... WRITE THEM DOWN. Yes that's correct, write your goals down and put them somewhere you will see them often. It also helps to write them down where others can see it as well so you are accountable to someone other than yourself.
So keeping to these above guidelines I will give an example and share one of my fitness goals for 2013. It is specific, simple, reasonable and I personally think it is fun to try and challenge my body to do things it doesn't naturally do.
By the 1st day of Summer 2013 I want to be able to accomplish 10 rapid fire one leg Pistol Squats. Don't know what those are? They look like this and they are insane.
A rapid fire Pistol Squat is when you lower yourself in this position all the way to the ground and then without touching the ground switch hop to the other foot and then come up in this same position on the opposite leg. Talk about quad and glute strength as well as balance, this little move delivers! I want to do 10 of these and right now I can't do one, I am close but just don't have quite enough strength but I think it's fun to try and throughout the year I will be posting videos of my progression with this simple goal. In fact I will post my "starting point" video later tomorrow so you can all get a good laugh because laughter is good for our health.
So now that you have the 3 golden tips to setting goals and ACHIEVING them, what are your goals?
