How to Crush Your Fitness Goals
Setting effective fitness goals is one of the best ways to maintain your motivation for training, and ensure you're continually progressing. Here's our guide to ensuring you always reach your fitness goals:
Where Are You Now?
Before you even begin to think about your goals, you need to know where you are now. Can you answer the following questions?
- What are you lifting? (e.g. what are your 1RMs?)
- How are you performing in the baseline WODs? (e.g. what's your Fran time?)
- What are you good at?
- What are your weaknesses?
- Do you have any mobility issues or movement restrictions?
Once you can answer these questions, you're ready to start setting some goals.
Set Realistic, but Challenging Goals
Your ability to achieve your goals depends upon setting the right goals to begin with. When doing this, you need to strike the right balance between realistic and challenging.
They need to be realistic, otherwise there's little point in pursuing them. However, if they're not challenging enough, they won't inspire you to push hard in order to achieve them.
Take a look at your goals, and ask yourself these questions:
- Can I achieve these goals within the next 12 months?
- Will I need to make some changes, and work consistently to achieve them?
Write Them Down
This may seem like a small detail, but the act of writing your goals down is surprisingly powerful.
It's important to write them somewhere visible, so you don't forget about them. Pin them to your noticeboard, keep them on your desk at work or in the front of a diary you use every day.
If your box has one, write it on the goals' board there too - then you're accountable to your training buddies, as well as yourself.
How Will You Get There?
The main reason people fail to crush their goals is rubbish planning. Setting effective goals will only get you so far, you also need to know exactly how you'll achieve them.
Break the goal down into manageable steps. If you think your goal will take you a while to achieve, set yourself some short-term goals to help you along the way.
This will keep you motivated, and provide assurance that you're moving closer towards your goal, even if progress is slow.
Don't just plan your training, either. What else do you need to do to make sure you crush your goals?
If you're going to be training hard, you'll need to make sure your recovery game is strong to avoid injury. Do you have right equipment? Are you taking the right supplements to recover quickly post-WOD?
What's Stopping You?
Be realistic about the challenges you'll face along the way, and build them into your plan. Do you have mobility issues you need to work on? How good is your technique? What's your training capacity?
If your range of motion is restricted, or you have inefficiencies with your technique, commit to improving those first. It might feel like a step back, but in reality this will get you closer to your goals (and more safely) than any other approach.
Review Regularly
Don't do the initial goal setting work and then forget about them. Review them regularly, and assess your progress. Are you on track to reach your short-term goals? Do you need to change your approach?
Be flexible, and take into account any lifestyle changes that require you to re-assess your strategy. When you review your goals regularly, you remember why you set them in the first place, which is vital to keep your motivation flowing!
What are your current fitness goals? Let us know in the comments!
