Do you know how to find your fitness goals? Behind almost every decision to join a gym or start a healthy routine is the motivation to achieve something.
Goals come in many shapes and forms and can range from self-improvement, wanting to be the best version of yourself for an event or challenge or even just to feel better about yourself when you look at your reflection in the mirror.
However, how do we find these goals? Often they can be dictated by a particular life event or occurrence in our day-to-day lives. Goals are completely personal to us so there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to finding them, but we’ve put together our top tips on how to find our goals:
Find your ‘why’
Whether it was consciously or subconsciously, at some point you’ve taken the decision to improve your health. It’s important to find your ‘why’ and have an overarching goal that’s important to you and not to others. If this goal has come from someone other than yourself, it may be more challenging to keep up your motivation.
Make sure it’s the right goal
It can be all too common that individuals set themselves a goal which isn’t necessarily the right one for them. For example, if you have a particular event or landmark that you’re aiming towards, you may say ‘I want to lose X amount of weight before my holiday’. While it may seem useful to put a number on things, how you look and feel in your body is way more than just the number you see on the scales. There are so many other factors such as your muscle mass and simply how you feel when you look in the mirror.
Instead, setting a goal such as ‘I want to feel confident and happy in my body before my holiday’ is more aligned with what you want to achieve and alleviates the pressure of hitting a certain number which may not really mean anything.
Break your goals down
Some goals may feel overwhelming so it’s important to break these down into smaller, more manageable milestones. For example, if we’re relating it to the above goal of wanting to ‘feel confident and happy in my body before my holiday’, this can be broken down into smaller goals including setting a target of exercising three times a week, cooking your healthy meals for the week etc. The larger goal will come as a result of accomplishing these smaller ones and you can enjoy the fulfilment of ticking them off your list as you go!
Set a realistic end date
Goals are rarely short-term so it’s important to put a realistic completion date on when you want to achieve them. Particularly when it comes to your own health and wellbeing, it takes time to establish new habits and make lifestyle changes so don’t be too harsh on yourself and give overly ambitious timelines on when you want to achieve your goals.
Key takeaways
Making the decision to improve your health is a big lifestyle change and it’s important for you to get to the bottom of what your goal is. It may take a little bit of time to find it but ultimately, it must come from you and shouldn’t be for the benefit of anyone else.
Make sure you’re fair to yourself and appreciate that progressing towards your goals isn’t always a straight line. We’re here to support you every step of the way and if you ever need help with finding the right goals for you, speak to one of our friendly team members in your local Anytime Fitness gym.
