Goals
Why setting out your goals is the secret to success.
Every single person on this planet who has achieved their goal and beyond, has done so with their goals written down. And this isn’t just writing down the goal and getting on with it, careful planning and reflection has curated their pathway. This is something we can apply to our own health and fitness goals.
When starting a fitness journey, we need a long term goal to strive for. A long term goal ranges anywhere from 1 year to 10+ years and can be anything. They represent the deeper ‘why’ into why we choose to start a fitness journey, which means it’s often not just about shedding some body fat. Some examples from our clients include wanting to ‘live a long and pain free life’ or ‘decreasing the risk of developing a cardiac disease so I can be around to see my grandchildren.’
Long term goals often come with a feeling of overwhelm due to the fact it’s far away from where they currently are. It’s completely okay to feel like this! This is why it’s important for us as trainers to set out smaller goals (short term) along the way.
Short term goals can be anything between 1 week to 6 months. Because of this, short term goals can be set as frequently and often as possible. They’re a great way to break down our bigger goal into smaller chunks and keep us focused on taking one step at a time.
Since coming out of Britain’s third lockdown, a lot of our clients’ short term goals over the next few weeks is to get back into a routine of work and gym without running themselves into the ground. This is where the accountability of a PT is beneficial, we make sure you schedule in time during the week for yourself!
In between the goal setting, we also need to identify the barriers that and plan how to overcome them. This is an inevitable part of any journey so the best we can do is plan for it. A common barrier for our busy City clients is ‘having a late night in the office so didn’t have time to meal prep for the next day’. Great – we have different options for this. We can either set a goal to meal prep all food over the week so we don’t need to worry about it throughout the week. Or, our clients made educated decisions when buying food on the go.
We understand that our busy clients haven’t got the freedom to meal prep everyday so we ensure their approach to nutrition is flexible to accommodate situations like this.