It’s the New Year and everyone is talking about New Year’s Resolutions. I did a quick search and from what I can find, anywhere from 40-50% of New Year’s Resolutions are made around health and fitness. That’s a significant amount of them. I also found that by January 19, around 80% of New Year’s Resolutions made, have already been given up on. That’s unreal!
What is the reasoning behind this? I have to wonder if it doesn’t have to do with the goal.
Insert: an article on goal setting. So that you don’t lose hope and quit after 2 weeks. Improving your health is too important to quit working on.
So how do you go about setting a goal that you won’t give up on? A lot of us have heard of SMART goals. The acronym used for goal setting that works. Let’s go over it and dive into it.
S- Specific
Your goal MUST be specific. Many people set goals like “I want to lose weight”, or “I want to get stronger”.
Sure.
But what does that actually look like for you?
Do you want to lose 5lbs? Or 50lbs? Do you want to get stronger at your bench press? Or your pull up? How many pull ups do you want to be able to do? Without knowing specifically what achieving your goal looks like, you don’t really give yourself a chance to achieve that goal. If you lose 5lbs but really wanted to lose 50lbs… technically you have “lost weight”, right? But you haven’t achieved your goal.
Take a minute and think about your goal. What is it that you really want? Why? How would it change your life for the better? Get specific with what that looks like. It might even get uncomfortable. But you know what? Change happens in the discomfort.
M- Measurable
Can you measure your goal? Here again, we overlap a bit with the specificity of your goal. You must be able to measure your goal in some way to know whether you are inching closer to achieving your goal, or further from it.
If you are adding weight to the bar, you are getting stronger. If the number on the scale is going down, you are losing weight.
It is also beneficial to have a couple of different ways to measure progress. Take a pull up for example. You could measure how many seconds you can hold an active hang for, or the weight of the band you use for band assisted pullups. Maybe you measure the number of eccentric “lowers” you can do.
Or when it comes to your fat loss, I’ll preach this until I die. You should always be tracking other measures of progress other than the scale. Things like circumference measurements, progress photos and clothes fit.
Having more than one measure of progress is beyond helpful when times get tough and progress seems to stall. Maybe the scale isn’t moving… but your waist circumference has gone down. That is progress.
Maybe you just cannot seem to get that first pull up… but you can hang for 20 seconds longer than you could when you started, and you’ve gone down a band size on your band assisted pull ups. That is progress.
Being able to measure your goal is important, not only for the end product, but for along the road. It’s going to be hard sometimes, it’s going to seem like you aren’t making any traction sometimes. Keeping tabs on these measures keeps the light at the end of the tunnel on.
A- Attainable
Is your goal attainable? Or is it a bit out to lunch? Do you actually need to lose 20lbs, or is 10lbs more realistic in terms of what a healthy and strong weight would be for you. Maybe you have an old injury that will get in the way of your goal to run a marathon. Could you do a 5k or 10k instead?
Making sure your goal is attainable is essential if you want to actually achieve said goal. Something completely unattainable will quite literally be out of reach and you will quit.
R- Relatable/realistic
Your goal to lose 20 lbs, is it important to YOU? Or is it something that someone else wants for you?
If your goal isn’t important to you, you are not going to want to put in the work and time it is going to take to achieve it. And when it comes to health and fitness goals, it’s going to take some time. This is the part of goal setting where you need to be very real with yourself. You need to think about the “why” behind your goal.
Becoming familiar with your “why” will not only give you a clearer vision of what your end result will be like, but it will also help to keep you motivated when times get tough and motivation dwindles.
It’s going to. Motivation does not magically show up everyday just because you have set a goal and plan to stick to it. And that plan? It’s not always going to pan out either.
Knowing the why behind your goal will keep you focused on the end result, rather than the immediate feelings of discouragement and discomfort.
T- Time bound
Do you have a date in mind that you would like to have achieved your goal by? This one is tough when it comes to health and fitness goals.
Personally, when working with my online 1-on-1 coaching clients, I rarely talk about the time bound part of things. While I see the importance of having a “finish line” for reaching your goal. There really isn’t an end date for achieving “health and/or fitness”.
Having a timeline works better for some goals than others. Take the goal of losing “20lbs”. Maybe the timeline on that goal is 6 months. That’s really pretty realistic, achievable and I don’t mind having a “goal end date” on that. Because when you are in a caloric deficit, sometimes having a light at the end of the tunnel is helpful. It feels a lot less daunting.
However, sometimes it doesn’t go according to plan. Sometimes life happens and progress is stalled. And to be quite honest, most people have a very unrealistic idea of what the timeline for fat loss looks like. Most times, it’s going to take longer than you think. Just because you don’t achieve your goal within the timeline you had set doesn’t mean you should quit and give up.
The changes you make to your lifestyle when it comes to health and fitness goals are also not timebound. They should be exactly that: lifestyle changes- that last the rest of your life. You can have a health goal to lose 20lbs, but it doesn’t stop there. Health is a lifelong pursuit.
It’s a lifelong pursuit that is completely worth pursuing. You don’t know it yet, but a healthier, happier, stronger and more confident version of yourself is on the other side of your 2026 health and fitness goal. Make this the year that you quit “starting over” when it comes to your journey to health, and you keep going instead.