TLDR
- Realise that fitness is a long-term endeavour, we’re talking decades not years.
- Knowing this, identify what your aspirational goal is!
Overview
- Three layers of goal setting
- Understand fitness is a long game
Considerations
Before we start identifying this we have to come to terms with two basic premises. Both of these are extreme ends of the spectrum and we can hopefully dispel these notions quickly.
Fitness is a life long project, not a six week rush job.
There’s a classic stereotype of a beginner looking for a personal trainer in a gym. The trainer asks what their goal is. The client replies ‘not much, I just want 6 pack abs for an upcoming beach trip’.
‘Have you ever trained in the gym before?’ ‘No, but I’m ready to smash this out training three times a day!’
‘When is your trip?’ ‘Two weeks away.’
Maybe you know somebody like this, maybe it was even you in a past life.
Needless to say, this particular client had unrealistic expectations. You don’t need an in-depth knowledge of fitness to figure this out either – just think logically about any hobby or discipline you’ve progressed on.
Were you speaking conversational Spanish in a fortnight of learning it? Did you really start playing Mozart in a month of learning the piano? Probably not, and fitness is the same.
It’s easy to lose sight of this since fitness is often portrayed as ‘easy’, along with it being tied to our self esteem, makes you want to downplay the project and turn it into a rush job. Take a step back, compare it to excelling at a sport, a language, a musical instrument, and you’re probably on the right track.
Fitness is a lifestyle, not your life.
The flip side of the coin; there’s an enthusiastic minority out here taking fitness too seriously.
If you’re bringing a banana to eat instead on family gatherings, then measuring the weight of the banana so you can chop off 17% of it to ‘fit your macros’, you can possibly consider relaxing a little.
If you’re skipping your friend’s weddings because ‘it falls on a training day’, you may want to reconsider your priorities.
Most importantly, you don’t need the use of pharmaceutical enhancements to look good. The sad reality is an increasingly large portion of people going ‘on the juice’ are beginners who absolutely do not need to do so. They are getting a physique that can be naturally obtained with a few hours a week for a few years time.
In exchange you’re sacrificing long-term health (isn’t that the very goal of fitness?) and also purely selfishly you lose the ability to troubleshoot your own progress, leading to quicker and more frequent plateaus in the future anyway!
Writing this out isn’t going to change the minds of anyone already set on any of this. This is more of a cautionary tale for the rest of us that these (very real) examples can be what happens when what should be a positive thing turns into a negative obsession.
A goal hierarchy
Now we’ve covered both fallacies, I suggest thinking in terms of a three layer goal system; a high, medium and low level.
Nothing new here at this stage, this is fairly well known goal setting theory, otherwise referred to as superordinate, intermediate and subordinate goals.
Setting high level goals
We know that a superordinate goal should be:
- Aspirational
- Broad
- Tied to your own values
This guide will assume and promote the following high level goal as a good starting point:
Feel good, look good, and move well for your own self confidence and self discipline.
Now you’ll need to do some soul searching to figure out your own personal values.
From there, you can craft a goal that holds meaning for you.