Fitness: Goal Setting

When you start a home fitness plan you need to set some goals. Without any goal setting you will not accomplish your fitness goals.

Questions to Ask Yourself

Why are you starting your exercise program? Do you want to lose weight? Do you want to increase your strength? Do you want to lower something like your cholesterol? You have to pick something you can measure.

Picking a goal of to feel healthy is not something you can measure. It is abstract and only you can decide if you accomplished that type of fitness goal.

A measured goal is better. A good one is how quickly can you run a mile? If initially it takes you 10 minutes to run 1 mile then you can set a goal to run 1 mile in 9 minutes. Running a mile in a certain time is an excellent type of goal.

Cannot Be Too Easy

Anytime you set a goal it must be challenging and push you. At the same time the goal setting has to be realistic. As in the previous example if you currently run 1 mile in 10 minutes setting a goal to run 1 mile in 5 minutes in the next month is not realistic. If you decided to set the time-frame to be in the next 6 months to run a 5-minute mile then you may accomplish that goal.

Fitness goals need to be a progression of getting better and better.

Let's keep using the fitness goal of running 1 mile in 5 minutes, but you currently at 10 minutes. Your next time should be to run 1 mile in 9 minutes. You cannot expect to your body to run fast just because you said you want to run that time.

Here is a Good Fitness Plan

You need to run or train daily. You have to train your heart and body to get used to running. If it has been years since you engaged in this type of exercise you may want to only run a quarter mile and the walk the next quarter mile. For the day this may be all you do.

Each day you need to run a little further and a little longer. At the end of the week or the beginning of the week go run a mile and see how quickly you can run a mile. The time should be decreasing with your increased time exercising.

Staying on your fitness plan will be the hardest part of goal setting. You need to continue to workout to accomplish running the 9-minute mile. Once you conquer this time you need to look at running an 8-minute mile.

Keep Getting Better and Better Everyday

The steadily improving time will help keep you on your fitness plan and accomplish your goal.

Now I used running as the exercise to measure your success. However, you can use any type of fitness goal such as weight loss or waist size to see how you are progressing.

I like using some type of exercise program because it can help accomplish two or more goals in one. Remember running a certain time will also potentially lower my cholesterol and lower my weight. I am sort of multi-tasking my goals of running faster, losing weight and lowering my cholesterol all in one exercise: running.

You can do the same with other fitness plans. Get creative and have fun goal setting with your fitness plan.