Setting Fitness Goals: Where to Start

Setting fitness goals is important. Without them, we wouldn’t know how much progress we’ve made or have cause to celebrate when we reach our ultimate goal. Thinking big is great, but you have to plan how you’ll get there.

Set your main goal

Your main goal may seem so far out of reach right now, but it’s useful to know how far you have to go. If you need the motivation to start, you can find one-to-one personal training in Leeds from Ultimate Performance. Their personal trainers are focussed on getting results. So today, you may only be able to walk up a moderately steep hill. However, as you improve, that hill might change into a mountain and there could be no limit to what you can achieve.

Break it down into smaller milestones

Thinking a little smaller can help. Your goal will still be there, but gradually building up to it will give you several milestones to reach and you can celebrate your progress with each one. So, if you want to hike around one of the many beautiful locations around the world, such as Australia, you could set a goal to walk for thirty minutes on a treadmill, gradually increasing the decline and amount of time. Then you might run a competitive 5k on rough terrain, then a 10k, and so on.

Regularly evaluate your progress

If it’s taking you a long time to hit certain milestones, you may need to change something in your routine, or even lower your expectations. Similarly, if you’re hitting every milestone with little effort, you might not be thinking big enough. It can be hard to set goals with no frame of reference, so don’t be afraid to adjust your goals to suit your needs and ability. 

Don’t be hard on yourself

Part of success is overcoming barriers and not giving up when things don’t go to plan. Sometimes you have to rest due to illness or injury, or you don’t see results as quickly as you would like. This can be disheartening, but if you come back and try again, you can only improve. Trying to continue training through illness or injuries will only make things worse. So, don’t be too hard on yourself. Just wait until you’re feeling better and try again.

Know when to push yourself

On the opposite end of the scale, it’s important to know when to push yourself. If you have a slight sniffle but it’s not a full cold or the flu, you might know your body well enough to know you can continue training. Or if your muscles ache from previous training sessions, you can learn to be self-aware and differentiate between your muscles getting stronger and a potential problem. If you rest every time you experience the former, you will never see a lasting improvement.

With any goal you set, you need to start somewhere. So try not to compare yourself to other people. It might seem like they have achieved more, but everyone was a beginner at one time in their lives.