Many of the people I know and get to know are interested in improving how they look, achieve greater fitness levels or just adjust their lifestyles to adopt healthier ones, all of them have the correct thing in mind but very few actually take the time to sit down and write down their goals and their plans to achieve it, that by itself may very well lead to failure especially if it is something they didn’t attempt and succeed in before and here is why:
“failure to plan is a plan to failure” it have been said before, to achieve your goal you must first know your goal and know how to measure your success in your attempt to achieve it, leaving things loose will make you unable to see where you are and where you’re going! Goal setting is not that hard really, do it right and you’ll be amazed but how clear your view would be of what you want to achieve and how close are you to it, here is an example:
Someone may say: “I’m an overweight man who wants to lose weight and become muscular“
from that statement we know that:
1. The person is currently overweight, but that is not enough! we need actual numbers such as the current weight in kg/lb, body fat % or even pants size.
2. The person wants to lose weight, the first question would be: How much weight? 10 kg? 20? 30? drop fat % by 10%? or do you want to lose enough weight to fit in your old size 32″ pants? you must be precise.
3. The person wants to become muscular, how muscular? Like Arnold? Like Arnel? define how much lean mass you want to put in and where.
The more precise you are about your goal the more you can visualize it and see it in front of you when you work hard to reach for it.
In general do the following in preparation of your goals:
Write on a piece of paper (write DON’T type) the following goals:
1. Your Ultimate Goal (the goal that is not easy to reach but once reached you’d be at the peak of your happiness in regards with fitness)
2. Your 1-year goal (The goal you want to achieve one year after you started following your plan)
3. Your 3-months goal (the goals you want to achieve each 3 coming months)
4. Your weekly goal (be it upping your cardio by 1 km/h or lifting 5 more pounds just write it)
5. Your daily goal (example: do 30 mins cardio and eat 5 meals)
Now place this paper somewhere where you can see it on daily basis (I have mine on the fridge!), and by all means change your goals as much as you like but don’t set them too easy or impossible be realistic and push yourself harder with each week/month, you will be amazed.
Finally, Go easy at the beginning, don’t start at the top, know that the best athletes started at the bottom at some point, if you can’t do 45 mins of cardio 7 days per week at 10 km/h then don’t! start at 20 mins at 6 km/h 3 days/week and increase the speed, time and days as the week go by, you will find yourself exceeding your initial plan as you develope endurance and cardiovascular fitness, take things one step at a time and you will be sprinting soon enough.
Before I conclude today’s post here is an update about last night’s workout:
It was a good workout, I did 20 mins of High Intensity Cardio and full body weight training, I’ve also stuck with my 5 meals.
For all of you who are reading this for motivation know that I once thought I couldn’t, once I stopped thinking that way things changed, you should do the same because believe it or not you can, its a matter of wanting it bad enough to go through and getting it. Stay strong and Shed hard!
