The new year has arrived and it’s time to set some new goals.  Why set goals?  Because they actually enhance your performance.  Goals keep you focused and motivated and all but guarantee progress in your business, in your life and in the gym.  Without goals, you are just spinning your wheels without any clear direction.  My best years in the gym have been the ones in which I have a specific set of goals to focus on and strive to accomplish.  A look back at my training logs revealed that my gains have been almost twice as many when I have specific goals to work towards then when I didn’t.

There are many schools of thought about goal setting so I will share what has worked for me.

First, I start off with a set of general goals to be accomplished by years end.  I then break it down into 90 day increments and finally I like to work backwards to determine what I need to do weekly and even sometimes daily to ultimately reach my year end goals.

Now, not all goals will take a year to accomplish.  If your goal is to deadlift 500 pounds for instance, you might be able to accomplish that in 2 or 3 12 week cycles.  By June, you may have met that goal.  Not to worry because all you do is check that one of the list in June and move on.  Maybe you shoot for another 50 or 75 pounds or you just work to maintain the weight.

If you goal is to lose weight, even if it won’t take 365 days to do it, you still would want to focus on a specific weight to be at on December 31rst.  Even if you hit your ideal weight come July, you obviously would want to maintain it so you would still need to work at it all year.  In that instance, your daily weight loss “to do list” would change once you got to your desired weight.  Same goal but a different approach from weight loss to weight maintenance.

Ok, we have now set a set of goals to reach by the end of the year, now break it down into 90 day cycles.  We do this because we want to evaluate our progress often, but not to often, in order to be sure we are on the right course.   There are some goals that may take you every bit of the year to finish and if we wait to long to evaluate where we are in the process, it might be too late to do anything about it if you are off course.

After we break it down into 90 day cycles, we now need to reduce it again to weekly and daily to do lists.   Some goals like weight loss or gain require daily action steps in order to reach them.  Other goals may be better measured on a weekly basis.  I break my workouts down by the week.  I have a specific set of workouts that all fit together into weekly cycles.  I usually workout 5 days a week so if I miss a workout on say a Monday, I just make it up another day.  On Sunday I evaluate my past weeks workouts (takes less then 5 minutes) and prepare the workouts for the upcoming week.

On some goals like lifting a specific amount of weight, it is beneficial to determine your ultimate goal and then work backwards to see what must be done daily, weekly and monthly to accomplish it.  Lets say that I am performing a 12 week overhead barbell press cycle.  I would first write down the weight that I would like to lift during the 12th week.  I then determine how much weight I would need to add each week to get from where I am now to where I want to be at week 12.  Same can be done for any of your goals.  Want to lose 20 pounds by summer?  If your “summer” starts in June, that’s roughly 3.3 pounds a month.  That seems more manageable then 20 pounds and you can check your progress ever 30 days to see how it’s going.

Two last points to consider.  Your goals have to be reasonable and focused and you have to write them down and review them daily.

Reasonable and focused means that you can’t just say, “I want to lift a lot of weight” or “I want to loose weight”.  Those goals aren’t very focused.  You also can’t say “I want to lift 200 pounds overhead” if you can’t even lift 100.  If you set a goal and reach it by August, set a new goal for the remainder of the year.  It is also best to focus on a few goals rather then 20 or 30.  Don’t overwhelm yourself.

Lastly, and this if extremely important, write them down and review them often; daily if possible.

You don’t have to review necessarily the daily goals or the weekly ones but you need to keep in the front of your mind what you want at the end of the year.  If you want to be at a certain weight, write it down and think about it every day.  It’s best to focus on the overall goal then to get bogged down in the details.  Doing so tends to confuse your mind and you can lose the big picture.

Oh, and one last thing.  When you set a goal, believe you can accomplish, don’t just hope you can.  Hope won’t get you there, only a heart felt belief in yourself and you abilities will.

Good luck and here’s to making 2010 your best year ever!

Dennis

P.S. – Check out my recent post on the power of belief.  Believe you can and you will!

Tweet This Post