Following a fitness plan can be hard to do. What works for one person may not work for you. Goals are not met or you give up entirely due to boredom or poor results. Here are 5 helpful tips on How to Set Fitness Goals You Can Actually Reach.
Setting fitness goals is often tough to do. Busy moms everywhere struggle to stay active while juggling family, work, and other obligations. Getting healthy is somewhere in the mix, but learning to set reasonable fitness goals is how we make it happen. Learn How to Set Fitness Goals You Can Actually Reach by making sure they fit into your lifestyle and are functional for your life. These helpful tips will get you started.
How to Set Fitness Goals You Can Actually Reach
1. Evaluate your fitness level right now. Are you a total couch potato that will need to start from the beginning? Are you already somewhat active, but want to tone up or improve your endurance? Knowing where you are starting will help you create fitness goals that you can safely reach without overdoing or causing an injury.
2. Start slow. As I mentioned above, you don’t want to go from the couch to running 5 miles a day. That’s just too harsh on your body! Knowing where you are, slowly increment the exercising you do on a weekly basis. If you are used to walking a mile a day, increase it to 1.25 miles the first week, then 1.5 miles the second. I also love using Leslie Sansone’s Walk Off The Pounds DVD for an easy introduction to walking at home.
3. Create SMART goals. In order to keep pushing along and meeting your goals, they need to be SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Sure, it would be nice to lose 100 pounds and be able to run 10 minutes in a month – but that takes much longer to work up to!
Make sure your goals are reachable and that you are specific within a time frame. Shoot to add an extra 10 minutes of exercise to each workout within 1 week. Another example, add an extra ½ mile to your run within a month. You also want to focus not just on pounds lost, but inches lost and even endurance gained.
4. Track your progress. Monitoring the rate at which you are moving to your goals is important. You need to see where you came from, as it’s motivating and makes you want to keep up the good work. It’s also great so you can see how well you are doing with your fitness, and how long it should take you to reach your goals.
Walkers and runners can use a tracker like a FitBit or Jawbone to keep up with distance and time. RunKeeper is also a good idea. It is a mobile app that syncs with many activity trackers to keep your routes, distance, and time all in one place for you to reflect on later.
5. Keep it Fun. Reaching your fitness goals should not feel like a chore. If they do, you’ll likely struggle with working out every day. When you set the goals, think about how you plan to achieve them.
Mix up your exercises to avoid becoming bored. For example, you can run one day, swim the next, lift weights the third day, and do a workout DVD in your home on the fourth day. The options for getting active are endless!
Setting up fitness goals that are functional for your routine is important for your ultimate success. These tips are a great beginning to a much healthier year!
More Fitness Tips:
10 Inexpensive Fitness Tools For Home Workouts
5 Reasons To Use A Fitness Tracker
100 Free Fitness Apps For Weight Loss And Work Outs
6 Steps To Getting Back On Track With Fitness And Exercise
10 Metabolism Boosting Superfoods
10 Simple Changes To Help You Lose Weight
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Pauline Wiles says
Related to “start slow”, I’d also suggest, if you’re not working out much now, don’t make a resolution to hit the gym *every* day. Try for twice a week, then increase it. I see lots of people “fail” in this way.
Alea Milham says
That is such a smart approach!