How to Determine Your Fitness Goals: A Strategic Guide

You are getting more consistent with working out, but now you want to get more specific with your fitness goals, so let’s deep dive into some considerations…

Having fitness goals helps to keep you motivated and gives you a reason to want to hit the gym. Goals don’t have to be complicated, they can be simple!

You want to always ensure your goals are suited and relevant to you. There is no point in adopting someone else’s fitness goals just to have a goal yourself.

The first consideration is to think about why you are working out in the first place. That may lead you to your main goal. Now that could be anything from wanting to build muscle, lose weight, improve your general fitness levels, or anything related to your fitness aspirations.

To help in picking a direction for your goals, I personally like to break fitness goals down into three main categories: aesthetic, performance, and general.

Types of Goals:

Aesthetic goals: These types of goals are based on your physical appearance, e.g. losing body fat, gaining muscle, and losing weight.
Performance-based goals: Relate to improving your abilities, e.g. run 5km in 60 minutes, do 10 pull-ups with proper form.
General fitness goals: This is a category I personally like to also add into the equation. These can be goals that are based around improvements in your general fitness and commitment to exercise, e.g. workout for 30 minutes 5 days a week, attend 3 Pilates classes a week, stretch for 10 minutes every day.

Now, you don’t have to have a fitness goal. If you find choosing a goal to work toward overwhelming, you don’t need to feel pressured to choose a specific goal. This is why I like to include a “general fitness goal” category. Because you may simply just want to feel stronger and get to the gym, and you know what? That is great!

However, having specific goals does help to keep you motivated and give your training direction. What your fitness goals are will help to determine what style of training will best suit you and get you to those goals. For example, if you are looking to build muscle as your main goal, you want to prioritise your strength training over other types of exercise.

To get even more specific with our goals, we can use the SMART goals method…

SMART Goals:

SMART is an acronym that stands for: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely (Time-Bound).

SMART goals help to ensure your goals are realistic to you personally and help you to focus on what needs to be done in order to achieve them and in what timeframe.

SPECIFIC: The more specific the goal is, the easier it is to create a plan of attack.
MEASURABLE: Your goal and your progress toward the goal should be measurable.
ATTAINABLE: Ensure you choose a goal that you believe is realistically achievable.
RELEVANT: Your chosen goal should align with your current lifestyle, values, and long-term aspirations.
TIME-BASED: Be ambitious but also realistic about your timeframe to achieve your goal. Realistic timeframes will help keep motivation high.

So, now that we know what SMART goals stand for, let’s talk about how we can use them to get more specific about our fitness goals.

Rather than just saying “I want to do push-ups on my toes”, we can get a bit more specific and set a realistic timeframe for when we want to achieve this goal using the SMART method. So how many push-ups do we hope to be able to complete on our toes, by when do we want to achieve this, and is all of that realistic and achievable?

Let’s create a SMART goal out of “I want to do push-ups on my toes” together:

Specific: We want to pick a specific number of push-ups…. So we could say, complete 10 push-ups on the toes without stopping. Of course, we ensure proper technique as we complete them.
Measurable: We want to ensure the goal and the progress can be measured. This specific goal can be measured by the number of push-ups completed on the toes with proper technique without stopping in between reps each time we train. (As time goes on, we should be completing more reps, getting us closer to our goal of 10).
Attainable: Attainable goals essential mean realistic. If you can only gym once a week and cannot currently complete any push-ups on your toes, you want to be realistic about how many you hope to achieve. Aiming for a high number, going from zero to 10 in a few weeks may not be realistic. So we want to aim for a goal that is realistic and attainable from our current fitness level and lifestyle (including our ability to put the time and effort into making progress).
Relevant: This is quite personal as you want to choose a goal that is realistic and relevant to you. The goal needs to align with your personal values, beliefs, and ambitions. If you hate training your upper body and dread doing push-ups, the above goal may not be a great choice that aligns with your current values. Possibly choosing a more meaningful goal to would help keep you motivated and lead you to the successful completion of the goal.
Time-Based: Setting a realistic timeframe for a goal will help you stay on track. If you desire to reach the goal by a certain date, you need to put in the work consistently. So we may set a realistic goal of 3 months to achieve this.

So the end result of this SMART goal becomes:

“Complete 10 push-ups on my toes without stopping and with proper technique within 3 months.”

That now gives you a SMART goal that you could then work toward. Doing these steps to break down your goal will help you create a plan of attack and allow you to monitor your progress toward the goal. This helps keep you on track and sets you up for success.

Now something to remember, our goals are important but they are not set in stone. We want to be as adherent as we can to them but unfortunately, not all goals are able to be achieved in the exact timeframe we sometimes choose. Life happens and can throw curveballs our way, we can occasionally go off track, and other factors can come into play. So this means, we need to learn that a bit of flexibility around our goals is okay.

We don't want to allow ourselves to be super lenient on the timeframe of our goals or not give our goals the priority they need. As this will likely lead us to never actually reaching them. However, reassessing the realisticness of our goals is needed sometimes, especially if big life events have occurred. For example, if your goal is to lose 5kgs in 3 months and you end up needing to reaccess that goal to be 5kgs in 5 months, then that is okay! It is not the end of the world!

We want to ensure we do not keep pushing our goals back, but we don't want to beat ourselves up if our goals take us a little longer to achieve than planned. Incorporating short, medium and long-term goals using the SMART goals method will help keep you on track and give you motivation to hit that predicted timeline.

Remember to give yourself credit for the little achievements along the way!

If you need help planning your fitness goals, feel free to book a FREE consultation with me. I am always more than happy to talk you through the process of planning your goals for success.