Goal Setting

Goal setting is an important component of your fitness journey. Setting goals regularly will help you keep motivation high and maintain consistency when it comes to training and overall health and fitness. By setting a goal, you give yourself a target to reach for and a further purpose to what you do every time you walk into the gym.

If you are not someone who sets goals, or someone who does set goals but feels they constantly come up short, here are some helpful tips to guide you in the right direction when it comes to goal setting.

The most common and effective practice for goal setting is picking goals that follow the SMART goal principles.

SMART is an acronym: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound. Smart goals are effective for all aspects of goal setting in life, not just in the gym, but the examples I’ll use relate to your health and fitness goals.

Specific - for a goal to be effective, it needs to be specific. “Get stronger” is not specific enough, you have to not only refine the goal, but think about:

• How much work will this take to achieve?
• What kind of work do I need to do to achieve this?
• What will I do to achieve this goal?
• Who can help me?

Thinking through these nitty gritty details will help you set more realistic goals that are more likely to be accomplished, as well as give you more context and details about how exactly you will go about working towards it.

A better example of a specific goal “Improve my back squat, by increasing my squat frequency up to two times per week, and work on my hip and ankle mobility everyday” (This is a short example, but you can definitely go into even MORE detail)

Measurable - being specific is important, but without having a number attached to it, how can we know when our goal is accomplished? “Improve my back squat” if you improve it by 1kg, you technically have accomplished your goal, but more than likely, 1kg is not quite what you wanted. Making a goal measurable makes it much easier to track progress and know when you can tick it off the list.

“Improve my back squat by 15kg, by increasing my squat frequency to two times per week, and work on my hip and ankle mobility everyday”

Attainable - Your goals need to be realistic, this just means that you need to choose goals that are reasonable and achievable, “Improve my back squat by 100kg” is probably a bit far fetched, if you struggle with this, ask a trusted person to help you with picking a number that is suitable to you, (Hint: Your coaches at Bond Performance are more than happy to help).

Relevant - This one is pretty self explanatory, your goal has to be relevant. It needs to relate to you and you need to want to achieve it, “I want to improve my back squat because Bob is stronger than me” is not the right way to go about it.

“Improve my back squat by 15kg, by increasing my squat frequency to two times per week, and work on my hip and ankle mobility everyday. I want to do this because this will transfer over to my other lifts in the gym, and it makes me happy to feel strong”

Time-based - Goals need to have a deadline, not setting a date for yourself to accomplish a goal by gives you no direction so the goal can easily be forgotten about. Setting a date allows you to keep the goal in focus and increases the chances of it being achieved. It is important to make sure your time frame for your goal is realistic (another thing your coaches can help you with). “ I want to improve my back squat by 15kg in two weeks” is not going to happen.

One thing that’s missing from SMART goals that I think is important, is to not pick too many goals at once, stick to one you can focus on, tick it off the list and move onto the next, trying to achieve too many goals at once will start to hinder your progress as you spread yourself too thin and possibly end up achieving none of them.

So we went from “Get stronger” to “Improve my back squat by 15kg, by increasing my squat frequency to two times per week, and work on my hip and ankle mobility everyday. I want to do this because this will transfer over to my other lifts in the gym, and it makes me happy to feel strong. I am going to aim to achieve this in 8 weeks time”. Quite a big difference between the two, but very important to make sure you are consistently smashing your goals and improving yourself not only in the gym, but in life in general.