What is Your End Goal?

We have just covered the importance of finding out why you want to conquer your fitness, but the next step is establishing just where you want to go. Or, where you want to finish to be more precise.

Sure, in the previous paragraph we may have mulled over scenarios behind your fitness journey, and some people might interpret these as goals.

As we’ll soon find out, goals are nowhere near as specific though. The ‘why’ contributes to the journey you’ll take, but the ‘goal’ is the end of the game.

Bearing the above in mind, it should go without saying that setting your goals is one of the most important things you can do. Once you have established just why you want to embark on your fitness journey, you need an end-point.

Without this, all of the problems that we touched upon in the previous section will come into play. Your motivation levels will be hit and when the going does get tough, not having that specific end-point is going to really hurt your progress.

Unfortunately, far too many people just don’t have an end-goal. Or, they just don’t have a reasonable end-goal. Let’s now take a look how you can tackle this issue.

The importance of drilling down specifically

If you feel that you have already set appropriate goals, it’s time to double-check them. If your goals are in the vein of “I want to exercise more” or “I want to lose weight” – this journey is going to be a long one. Taking the above two quotes as examples, how exactly will you know that you have reached your goal? In fact, how will you be able to measure your progress at all? The answer is simple – you can’t.

Generic goals are one of the biggest problems around. Sure, you know the basis of what you are doing, but this is barely actionable and the goals are never going to hold you accountable (unless you utterly fail and it’s blatantly obvious to everyone).

To highlight what we mean in further detail, let’s take a look at those two examples we honed in on. Regarding the weight loss “goal”, let’s work at rephrasing that. Pick a specific weight and work from there; “I will work out regularly and lose 10kg”. As long as you know your current weight, this is perfectly attainable and allows you to regularly plot your progress.

Let’s take a look at the other example regarding additional exercise. Exercising “more” can come in so many ways – it might mean turning the television on by walking to the screen, rather than using the remote control, in the eyes of some people.

However, stating that you will exercise three times a week, and go to a spinning class, is completely specific and you can quickly judge whether you are succeeding or not.

The importance of wording your goal appropriately

Hopefully this next point is something that most of you will have realized by now. If you take a look at the two goals we have “rewritten”, it has been done with a common word. That word is “will”.

“I will work out regularly and lose 10kg” and “I will exercise three times a week”.

Some people might only view this as a word, but the power of it should not be underestimated. If you were to say “I should” or “I want”, an element of doubt is immediately brought into play. Sure, everyone wants to do something, but it’s only when you tap into definitive words that these goals become a reality.

How will you reach your goal?

Now that you have documented your goals, it’s time to work out exactly how you are going to achieve them.

The best way to do this from a mindset perspective is to break things down into small wins. They don’t have to be life changing – but they can result in those small steps that can lead to huge rewards as you make progress.

For example, one of your goals might have been “I will work out three times a week”. For somebody who has never stepped foot in a gym, or performed any other type of training, this can be quite a huge ask.

However, if we were to say that your three sessions were going to be just twenty minutes each, suddenly things look a lot more achievable. Sure, it’s not going to remain at this low intensity forever (at least it’s not if you are planning to make substantial progress) but by breaking it down into these smaller wins obstacles can become easier to overcome.

Then, you can slowly add to them, and work from there.

A summary on goal setting

There are all sorts of scientific ways to look at goals. In fact, most of you will probably have been expecting the SMART mechanism at this point.

However, rather than bamboozle you with jargon, just ensuring that all of the above in place is sufficient most of the time. As long as a goal is specific and measurable you will have a clear end-point in sight – and at this point some of you may even wish to make the goal even more granular by adding a time constraint.

Sticking to this approach, rather than the “generic” approach that so many others use, will ensure that your training schedule has a much stronger chance of succeeding – particularly if you have implemented everything from the previous chapters.