Quality goals are important. Most athletes set broad goals for themselves, such as to eat healthy, increase their speed, add weight. But that is no good. How do you track your progress to see if you’re on track to accomplish these? You need to put thought into the goals you wish to accomplish. This guide makes goal setting easy.
Step One: What do we wish to accomplish? Set appropriate main goals first.
The first part of setting an appropriate, attainable goal is to figure out what you want. This is where most people get into trouble. They generalize too much. “Gain weight,” “get stronger,” are goals that are too abstract. The key is to be specific. “I want to gain twenty pounds of muscle by August,” “I want to increase my 40-yard dash speed by two tenths of a second,” are much more specific and concrete. You can easily set appropriate secondary goals and track progress this way.
You want to establish a goal that will push you past your limits, yet is still attainable. Let’s use an example that you’re a football player looking to add muscle by training camp in August. You’re going to start your weight and nutrition program in January. Putting on five pounds of muscle per month is a very good month. Knowing that you’ll have a solid seven months from now until training camp, you could put on35 pounds of muscle. However, you need to factor in other things, such as getting sick and your conditioning program. So keeping these in mind, set a goal of 25 pounds by August.
So now you have a well-defined and attainable goal. Let’s move onto the next step.
Step Two: How are we going to accomplish our main goal? Let’s make those our secondary goals. Ones that will set us up to achieve our main goal.
Secondary goals are necessary to help you track your progress. You should already know what they are from your calculations of your main goal.
Using our earlier example, we figured that five pounds of muscle per month would be good and attainable for us to reach our main goal. Five pounds of muscle per month is your secondary goal. If we attain five pounds of muscle per month, we’ll achieve our goal and then some. Just because we left some space in our main goal for unforseen occurances, that doesn’t mean we don’t push ourselves for the five pounds per month. Don’t waste the margin of error we gave ourselves.
Step Three: Track your progress.
Track your progress to see if you’re accomplishing your secondary goals. How you track your progress is determined already. This can be anything from seeing your weight increase in the weight room, to your practice times dropping for the events you run.
Step Four: Revise your program and goals if needed.
If something isn’t working for you, change it. This can be anything from changing your workout program to modifying the goals you have. If you achieve your goals earlier than you thought possible, increase your goal to push yourself. Or say you’re on your way to accomplishing your main goal, but you found an area you’re lacking in. You can create/modify your goals to help you strengthen your weaknesses as well.
Follow these steps and you will become a better athlete. Don’t fall into the trap of setting abstract goals that don’t mean anything. Keep your goals specific, attainable, track your progress, and revise as necessary.
