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You’re finding it hard to get out of bed to go for that morning run. Struggling to keep with your training routine.

The training program has been collecting dust for quite some time now.

Lunch time swim sessions and evening gym workouts have been sidelined because you are … too busy with work… too tired … have no time…

Chances are that you’re not training towards anything, you do not have a fitness goal and find it hard to motivate yourself to workout.

However that is all going to change.

After reading this article, you’re going to set yourself a fitness goal and get back onto your training program (or write one)

How will a fitness goal benefit me?

Well, having a fitness goal allows you to have something to work towards achieving. -It gives you a reason to exercise!

It also provides a form of measure to see how much you have improved. -So you’ll be training hard towards it!

and it is motivation for keeping with a training plan.

Fitness goals.

Fitness goals can varies from training towards an event (i.e: a  half-marathon, a triathlon, etc) to training towards and set goal (I want to be able to run 10km without stopping. I want to be able to fit into my wedding dress, etc).

You can also set your fitness goals together with your personal trainer and most gyms and health clubs offer these services.

An important thing when setting goals is that it has to be measurable!
Goals such as “I want to be Fitter” or “I want to be tone” are not good goals as you cannot measure them and track your progress to determine how much closer you are towards achieving those goal.

Also your goals will need a time frame!
I’m a runner and hence most of the goals I set are for upcoming running events. An example of a goal would be, I like to run a PB (personal best) in the Sydney Blackmores Half-Marathon in September.
The goal is measurable as I know what my best time for completing a half-marathon is and I can track how close I am to achieving a PB.
The goal also has a time frame which is the event date and I know I have a set number of weeks to train before the event.
It is very important that you have a time frame to your goal. Otherwise it’s easy to sideline your training, telling yourself that you’ll get back into it the next week.

So, now it is your turn, time to write your fitness goal.

Below are some questions you might want to ask yourself when writing your fitness goal.

1. What do I want to achieve? (an upcoming event, a particular target)
2. What sort of time frame do I have to achieve this?
3. How am I going to go about achieving this? (This is where you write your training program)
4. Is my target realistic? (We don’t want to plan to fail down here do we? no point having a goal to do an ultra marathon in 2 months time when you haven’t done a run longer than 10km)
5. What will my reward be WHEN i achieve this goal. (It feels good to accomplish something, and it is always good to give ourselves a little reward when we get there)

So, what’s your next fitness goal and how do you plan on reaching there?