Health and Fitness Psychology '"Successful Goal Setting

It's common for people to think about the impact of exercise and nutrition on their body, but most people don't really think about the effects of psychology or their mindset on their results. If you have the right mindset, it greatly increases your chances of improving and experiencing long-term success in all aspects of health and fitness. On the other hand, if you have the wrong attitude, it can completely sabotage your efforts.

When it comes to long-term success, your goals have a significant impact on your overall success. It is important to figure out want to accomplish with your health and fitness routine and it is critical that the things you come up with are truly important to you.

Working to achieve something that is important to you results in greater long-term motivation and success than if you are trying to achieve something just because someone else wants you to. When you choose what you want to accomplish, you are taking control over the course of your life.

When other factors determine your goals or you work to accomplish things that are not that important to you, you are giving your control to external factors. When you maintain control over your choices, they become more personal and you are more likely to succeed at anything that is more personal or important to you.

Setting goals is something that most people are familiar with, but few people take the time and effort to set concrete goals for themselves. One reason is probably because determining what goals to set can be difficult or frustrating, especially if you don't have any previous experience with goal setting. While a complete explanation of goal setting is beyond the scope of this post, I will explain the basics to get you started.

When I introduce the concept of goal setting, I like to compare it to a cross-country drive, because they share a number of similarities. The first thing you should do is determine your starting point and your destination. In terms of health and fitness, the starting point would be your current health and physical condition. You should analyze your strengths and weaknesses and determine what specific things you want to change or improve.

Your destination then corresponds to what you ultimately want your health and physical condition to become as a result of your nutrition and training. In other words, your destination is really your long-term goal(s). The importance of determining your long-term goals cannot be overstated, because if you don't know where you are trying to go, it will be very difficult to get there. Your long-term goals should be as specific as possible and you should honestly be able to envision yourself reaching them at some point in the future.

Intermediate-term goals can be thought of as stopping points on your cross-country drive. These are essentially milestones for your journey and they should be things are important for you to accomplish, but are not your ultimate goal.

For example, this can be doing something you have not done in a long time, such as fitting into a particular piece of clothing or accomplishing a specific athletic feat. The number of intermediate-term goals can vary significantly from person to person, but generally speaking, the more ambitious the long-term goals, the more intermediate-term goals you should have.

Short-term goals could be considered towns or parts of cities you pass on your journey, so you should have frequent short-term goals and they will be the bulk of your goal-setting program. Depending on what works best for you, there could be daily and/or weekly goals for you to achieve.

Short-term goals should be very specific and completing these goals will keep you on the path to reaching your intermediate and eventual long-term goals. Some examples of short-term goals would be only having 1 soda every other day or walking 4 days during the week. Achieving short-term goals provides small but frequent accomplishments to help keep you motivated to stick with your program.

As for the goals themselves, each goal should be as specific as possible. Having goals like "get in better shape" or "lose weight" are not considered good goals, because they are too vague and progress becomes difficult to measure. Better goals would be things like "decrease my 1 mile run time by 30 seconds" or "lose 30 pounds in the next year." Of course these are just examples and your particular goals need to appropriately reflect you current level of health and fitness.

Another important part of creating goals is to make them both challenging and attainable. If your goals are too easy to achieve, you will not get a sense of accomplishment from completing them and you will not get the same increase in motivation as you would if you really had to work to accomplish the goal.

On the other hand, if your goals are too hard and not attainable, then you may end up feeling as though you have failed, even if you make significant progress. Figuring out the right difficult may be hard at first, but if you think they are too hard or too easy, then you should modify them until they become challenging and attainable.

The other thing I must point out is when creating your goal setting program or as in the above analogy, determining the route for a cross-country drive, you need an accurate map.

When it comes to health and fitness, the map is really your knowledge and understanding about exercise and nutrition, including the results you can expect from the program you intend to follow. The better you understand the elements that make up your routine, the better your program will match your goals, and the better long-term success you will experience.

Source:

14 years of experience and education in health and fitness and a BA in psychology from Grinnell College