Welcome to the third and final part of this mini-series about goals and goal setting in fitness. In the first part we looked at what types of goal you might have and then in part two we saw how to give your goals a time scale and how to motivate yourself to keep achieving your goals. To complete the series, I am going to go through the other variables you need to consider to ensure the goals you’re setting are ‘SMARTER’ goals.
The acronym ‘SMARTER’ is used across many fields to help people set meaningful and useful goals. Here is what the letters stand for:
S = Specific
M = Measurable
A = Achievable
R = Relevant
T = Time Bound
E = Evaluate
R = Re-adjust
Now I want you to remember the goals you wrote down after the first blog post, and to which you added a time scale after the second. As I take you through each letter of SMARTER I want you to apply it to your goals.
Specific
A goal needs to be clearly defined. This is key as, if your goal is vague, it makes the rest of the SMARTER principles very difficult to apply. For example, if you have a goal such as ‘I want to get stronger’ there could be any number of ways to measure or achieve it; but if you make your goal ‘I want to increase my leg strength to be able to back squat 1.5 times my body weight’ you now have a clear and specific goal with obvious ways to measure it.
Measurable
If you don’t have a way of measuring your progress, how will you know when you have achieved your goal? With some goals, this can be as simple as timing yourself, or measuring distance or weight. For others, such as for Technique goals, you might need to video yourself so you can see how much progress you have made. Knowing where you’re up to with your goal is very important for staying motivated.
Achievable
This one can be a tough one to judge. A goal should be challenging so that you feel a sense of satisfaction when you achieve it, but, if you set your goal too high then it can become demoralising. Remember you can make goals more or less achievable by changing the timescale as well as the specifics of the goal. Take the goal ‘I am going to run a marathon’, for example. If you set the timescale for 4 weeks this might be unachievable. By making it ‘I am going to run a marathon in 6 months’ time’ you still have a challenging goal, but you have increased the achievability of it by changing the timescale. Similarly, maybe you have run a marathon before, so the goal of just running another one is very achievable but not that challenging, so you can change the specifics and say, ‘I want to run a marathon x minutes faster than last time’.
Relevant
Each time you set a goal you should consider how it fits into the big picture – particularly with your short- and medium-term goals, they should be helping you on the way to achieving your long-term goals. It is also important that any concurrent goals you set complement each other. For example, if you have a Best Effort goal related to increasing strength then a complimentary Health goal would be to increase protein intake. In this scenario a Health goal related to weight loss would not be relevant and might hinder your progress towards the strength goal.
Time Bound
Always set a deadline to achieve your goals as this helps you to maintain motivation. I discussed this part of goal setting in more depth in part 2, which you can read here if you missed it.
The ‘E’ and the ‘R’ at the end of SMARTER come after the deadline you set to complete your goal has passed.
Evaluate
This is about looking back at the goal you set and how successfully you achieved it. Ask yourself these questions:
1. Did I achieve my goal in the time I set for it?
2. Was it a challenge or did I find it easy to achieve the goal?
3. Why was the goal too easy or too difficult to achieve?
Re-adjust
Now based on the answers to the above questions you can change any of the SMART parameters to set a new goal or if you didn’t quite achieve it this time, re-set the same goal in a different way based on your experience.
Hopefully if you’ve followed along with this goal setting series you now have a collection of great goals to help you progress on your fitness journey. If you need any further help setting your goals, or would like a personalized training programme to help you achieve them then please get in touch.
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