As someone who works out and lifts weights, it’s important to set goals for yourself.
Goals help you establish the why you’re working out.
Without having goals for yourself, you’d never know what you’re working towards.
Not only is it important to set goals, it’s also important to make them achievable.
Sure, you can set extreme goals for yourself, but if they’re nearly impossible to achieve, what’s the point?
In this post, I’m going to cover everything you need to know about setting goals for yourself. Along with every thing you need to do to actually achieve your gym goals.
In this post you’ll find:
Why you NEED goals in the gym
The main reason you need to set goals for yourself is because they give you a purpose in the gym. They give you something to work towards and strive to achieve.
On top of that, your goals also give you motivation to workout. This is because when we know we’re actually working towards something, we feel much more determined.
This determination becomes even greater when we can see ourselves making progress towards are goals.
Then it becomes even greater when we finally achieve them.
You can’t have a workout routine without goals!
Additionally, establishing your goals is essential to creating your workout routine.
This is because your goals help you determine how you should be training to achieve them.
This allows you to structure your workouts better. For example, if one of your weightlifting goals is to grow your legs, then you can create your workout routine to favor leg growth.
The first steps to setting your goals
Now that you’re familiar with why you need to set goals and how they help you plan your workouts, we can cover how to actually set these goals for yourself.
Determine what you ultimately want to get from your workouts
In order to set your goals, you have to be honest with yourself about what you actually want to achieve from your workouts.
Begin by asking yourself what it is you want to achieve and what benefits you want to see.
For example, do you want to lose fat? Or maybe lose weight? Body recomp? Improve your mental health? Or see any other of the benefits from weightlifting?
Maybe you have multiple goals and want to see multiple benefits. Who wouldn’t want to see all the benefits you possible could?
Don’t hold yourself back. You can strive for and achieve many goals at once.
Set short term and long term goals
Once you establish your goals, the next thing you’ll want to do is determine which are short term goals and which are long term goals.
Doing this will allow you to give yourself the correct time frame to achieve your goals.
Additionally, it will also help you break down your long term goals into smaller, short term goals.
One of the best ways to achieve big goals is to continue achieving smaller goals that you get you closer and closer to your big goal. Breaking your goals down can help them seem much less intimidating and much more achievable.
Because of this, the more short term goals you achieve, the closer you can get to achieving your long term goals.
Write down your goals and how you want to achieve them
Once you’ve established your goals, you’ll want to write them down.
This will help you stay more organized as well as allow you to hold yourself accountable.
Once you write down your goals, they’re set in stone. This means you’ll always have a place to reference them and remind yourself what you want achieve.
Along with writing down your goals, with them you’ll also want to write a plan for how you’re going to achieve these goals.
For example, let’s say your goal is to gain 5 pounds of muscle. What steps would you take to achieve this goal?
A good plan of action might be something like lifting weights 4 times a week, increasing your protein intake, and increasing your water intake.
All of these are essential for muscle growth, and all of them are entirely achievable smaller, goals.
By writing these steps down, you ensure that you have a clear plan of what you need to do to achieve your goals.
On top of that, you again give yourself a spot to come back and reference and a spot to hold yourself accountable for what you said you were going to do.
Follow through with what you say you’re going to do!
I can’t tell you how many times I get to the gym and feel like cutting my workout short. Whether it be because I’m tired, busy, or just don’t feel like working out. It always seems like there’s a good excuse for not finishing my entire workout plan that day.
I’ll think to myself, “oh it’s just one exercise, what difference will it make if I skip it?”.
The answer is it will make a huge difference!
Luckily, I’m always able to remind myself that I need to stick to my plan. How else would I be able to achieve my goals?
The main point here is that achieving your goals is simple. Once you define your goals, you create a plan for yourself, then you do this plan.
However, where most people fall short is the doing part. We struggle to actually commit to and follow the plan that we made for ourselves.
Don’t start tomorrow, start today!
It’s easy to get into the constant habit of telling yourself you’ll “start tomorrow”. Or, cutting back on your effort today and saying you’ll put in more effort tomorrow.
The problem with this is that it becomes a habit. And, tomorrow never actually comes!
Once you allow yourself to cut back and slack off, you start doing it all the time, more and more.
Additionally, if you keep putting off doing things today and pushing them to a tomorrow that never actually comes, when will you ever be working towards your goals?
What I tell myself, and what I think you should tell yourself too, is this, “If I can’t do it today, then I won’t do it tomorrow”.
Meaning if you can’t commit to working towards your goals TODAY, then what’s going to be different tomorrow?
Repeating this to myself every time I feel like cutting back or slacking off helps me get myself back on track.
It’s important to break out of the habit of constantly putting things off and never working towards what you really want in life.
Instead, start putting in the effort today, so that you can see results tomorrow.
Commit to lifestyle changes
In order to have a different outcome in your life, you need to start doing something different.
This means if you have goals that are different from your current lifestyle, achieving these goals will require you to commit to lifestyle changes.
For example, if you want to get in better shape, this would most likely require you to commit to a more active lifestyle.
However, don’t let this intimidate or discourage you. These changes don’t have to be extreme.
But you do have to be willing to make at least some changes in order to see changes.
How to make your goals achievable (and make sure you actually achieve them!)
Now that you know how to set your goals, we can cover the best part. How to actually achieve your goals!
Make gradual improvements rather than extreme changes
The best way to end up quitting your goals is to make too many changes, too quickly.
Most of us are used to living pretty similar lives everyday. We create a routine for ourselves and generally stick to it. Because of this, almost everything you do in life is a habit that your body is used to.
When you try and make changes to these habits too quickly, it’s almost like you send your body into a little bit of shock. By doing this, these changes usually become too uncomfortable and unsustainable.
For example, let’s say you’re trying to lose fat. One of the best ways to do this would be eating more nutritious foods.
Now let’s say you try to immediately cut out all sugar and processed foods from your diet. Because this is so different from your normal diet and lifestyle, this would be an extremely hard, sudden change for your body.
As a result, you most likely wouldn’t be able to sustain this.
Instead, what you could do is gradually reduce sugar and processed foods in your diet. Swap out one of your favorite processed foods everyday for something that you still enjoy, but that’s better for your body.
Instead of trying to make instant, extreme changes, start slowly and gradually implementing lifestyle changes.
Begin to emphasis small improvements in your daily life, rather than huge, instant changes.
Give yourself a reasonable amount of time to achieve your goals
The biggest part of making your goals achievable is to allow yourself enough time to achieve them.
I’m sure many of us would love to be able to just achieve our goals over night, that’d be great!
Unfortunately, that’s not how things work. We’re actually more likely to achieve our goals when we give ourselves a reasonable amount of time to work towards them.
If we try to achieve our goals as quickly as possible, we’re more likely to set unrealistic expectations for ourself.
Having unrealistic goals and expectations causes us to try and make too many changes, too quickly. Once we do this, chances are we won’t be able to sustain these changes and will end up giving up.
Instead, what we can do is focusing on setting realistic goals and give ourselves enough time to achieve them.
Allow yourself enough time in the day to work towards them
Along with allowing yourself enough time to complete you goals, it’s also important to allow yourself time each day to work towards your goals.
No matter what your gym goals are, achieving them will require long, term consistency. This means you’ll have to be continually chipping away at your goals almost everyday.
For example, if one of your goals is to gain muscle, you’ll need to spend time at least 4 to 5 days a week lifting weights.
This will require you to set aside time for the gym each of those days.
You may need to sacrifice a little bit of your free time…
When you’re setting the time aside, this might mean you may need to sacrifice some of your free time in order to see the results you want to see.
Remember though, you don’t need to set aside hours and hours a day to spend time in the gym in order to see results. Instead, it’s about small, long term consistency.
Don’t let any of this discourage you though. In the long term, you’ll be glad you invested your time into improving yourself.
Learn to balance your goals with your other priorities
This is another big one. It wouldn’t be healthy if you were always in a “go-go-go” constant need to improve mood. Keep in mind life is all about balance.
This means you’ll need to balance working towards your fitness goals with the rest of your life. Yes, it’s good to be always wanting to improve yourself, but you don’t want your determination to overtake your life.
Achieving your goals is important, but a lot of other things are important in your life, too.
Because of this, while you’re allocating time in your day to work towards your goals, you want to make sure this time doesn’t always over impede on the rest of your life.
Yes, sometimes you’ll have to make sacrifices in order to see results, but you don’t want this to take away from other aspects of your life.
You still want to be able to have time for other things that you value in your life.
For example, maybe after school or work everyday you go to the gym. But you end up staying there for three hours and never have time to see your friends and family anymore.
If friends and family are something you really value, then you should consider ways to balance both the gym and quality time with your friends and family.
This will help you find a balance between working towards your goals and everything else that you value in life.
Takeaways
Setting goals in the gym is crucial to motivate yourself and give your workouts structure. However, setting goals is the easy part, but achieving your goals is where things can get tricky.
However, by committing to your goals and your word, achieving your goals is entirely possible.
Especially if you approach your goals in a more gradual way rather than an extreme way.
If you do these things, you’ll be seeing results in no time!
More posts on women’s weightlifting:
Here’s why weightlifting gets BETTER the more you do it