3 – SMART Goals
Whether you’re looking to clean up your diet, kick-start your gym routine, or completely overhaul your daily wellness, simply getting started can feel overwhelming. Our best advice? Start small, make a plan, and start today!
Setting goals is an important difference between success and failure, especially when it comes to fitness. A great way to set and keep your program goals is to use SMART (specific, measurable, accountable, realistic, and time-bound) goals. Setting specific, challenging goals has shown to achieve a higher performance than broad, easy ones. This means that with the proper planning and measures in place, you’re more likely to achieve your goal—even if it’s harder.
Specific: Choose a specific goal, like exercising 30 minutes a day rather than the vague “exercise more.” Setting specific goals may seem like a no-brainer, but is more important than you may think. Specificity goes a long way in your conscious and subconscious mind and allows your brain to map your course to success. In research done with athletes, the more specific their visualized desired outcome, the more likely they were to achieve it. For example, runners who visualized beating their previous time versus runners who visualized crouching at the starting line, having their best start ever in detail, running the entire course without a hitch, moving faster than ever with ease, and finishing at an all-time record for themselves, were more likely to surpass their past records.
Measurable: Determine how you will measure your goal. Track how often you exercise, how many minutes per workout, or how many miles you run.
This is not simply measuring results, but additionally factoring in components that contribute to results. Incorporate a measure of the metrics that will get you to the goal instead of measuring just the goal itself, which is the key to the M in SMART.
For example, if your goal is to be able to run an 8-minute mile, identify what is needed to achieve this result and measure it. For example, if your form is bad, running harder with bad form isn’t going to improve your speed as effectively as daily drills to improve your technique.
Accountable: Develop a way to be held accountable. Share your goal with a friend or coworker and ask them to follow up, for example. The Slique in 60 Challenge group is a great way to hold yourself accountable and stay involved in a like-minded community all striving toward similar goals.
Realistic: Make sure that your goal is attainable. Set goals you can keep, like exercising 30 minutes a day rather than 2 hours per day. We are also more interested in sticking to things that are important to us. If our goals feel random and useless, then you will be less likely to stick with them. Make sure that your goals are realistic and relevant to you!
Time-bound: Establish a specific time in which you plan to accomplish your goal. You can create benchmarks for daily, weekly, and monthly goals, adjusting along the way. Goals that never end can be demotivating. Placing a specific amount of time around a goal is an important part of staying motivated! For example, setting a goal to follow a vegan diet for one month and then assess your results is a great way to begin a potential lifestyle change.
What are your SMART goals this year?
