Welcome back, fellow MisFits - real women, men, people - who want a better life for themselves through working on the one thing that we all have our entire lives - our bodies.
Last week, we started our "5 P's" series on the five pillars of a fitness journey, by starting with Purpose. Purpose is the WHY you workout, which informs our goal - what tangible goal can we accomplish that will help satisfy our purpose?
We spent last week discussing purpose's importance, and asking you to ask yourself some questions that would really narrow this down and hone in on that important "why."
Now comes the fun part.
Well, it's fun for us coaches anyway.
And it can be fun for you because this next step helps simplify that larger grandiose purpose into an attainable goal, and I encourage you to write this down some place you will see it every day: the S.M.A.R.T. Goal!
Many of you in education, the military, or business... and many of you who are in none of those... might recognize this model right away.
In which case, you know that it is doubly important not to skip ahead.
I first learned about (or at least remember learning about and retaining) this in the Army. The Army is well known for it's love of acronyms.
Simply put, a SMART goal is a goal that is:
Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Timely
The exact wording of that varies from speaker to speaker, but the end result is the same: for a goal to be accomplishable, it must satisfy these components.
It cannot be vague, it has to be specific.
What exactly are you trying to accomplish? Fat loss, muscle gain, both? Are you trying to become more mobile, or promote longevity? Great. Now narrow that down more specifically.
Usually, we would also ask questions that help keep this specific with goals outside of fitness, like "who is accomplishing this goal" but we know that answer - that's you.
So, again, narrow it down. If your answer to purpose was to get healthier because of medical insurance or coverage, then that usually implies weight loss.
Narrow it down. How MUCH weight loss? Where are you now, and where do you need to be? For this example, we will say Client X needs to lose 50 lbs. Great. We have our Specific.
Now, our goal needs to be Measurable.
How are we going to measure this goal? With weight loss, that's easy - a scale and, hopefully, a good one with body composition analysis.
But how often are we going to measure? I usually advise no more often than every two weeks due to change in water weight and bloating that can occur between weekly check ins. Even with those, if someone is consistently losing weight, it will still show despite water retention when measured biweekly.
So now that we have our goal, and we have how we are going to measure it, we can also break it into measurable chunks - how much weight needs to be lost... in how much time? If you want to lose 50 pounds, how long will it take to lose that? This answer ties into the remaining factors pretty closely, but for now, we will say that after determing that amount of time, you need to be able to track how much weight can be lost ideally each two weeks.
Our next metric for a SMART goal is Attainability.
Some people use "achievability" with this step, but it's the same thing, and it starts with an A... and I tend to find it rolls off the tongue easier.
A GOOD goal is a goal that is possible to attain. Not one that is a "pie in the sky" lofty goal that bites off more than you can chew.
Why? Because most people, and most of the clients I have had in my experience, become discouraged and either give up or slow down if they aren't seeing the progress they want fast enough, and this starts by making sure that progress is the reflection of a realistic goal.
A healthy rate of weight loss, in general, is 1-2 pounds per week. This doesn't take into account people who can lose faster, or the weight that comes back on due to increased muscle mass. But, with this number in mind, we can set a realistic goal for our Client X, who wants to lose 50 pounds.
At that rate, 50 pounds lost at 1-2 pounds per week, it would take 25-50 weeks to lose the weight. If we average it at 1.5 pounds per week, that means it would take Client X 33 weeks to lose that weight.
Going back to our measurable metric, this means we would want to take their goal, and break it up into smaller and bigger benchmarks. Every two weeks, we would want them to weigh in and have lost 3 pounds if their goal was 1.5 per week. At a minimum, we would be shooting for 2 pounds. If that wasn't happening, we would want to check and see what they were or weren't doing inside and outside of the gym - from supplements and diet, to exercise and active recovery.
Our fourth metric, Relevant, has everything to do with motivation - and ties into one of our 5 P's very closely. Relevancy is the why you are doing it, and the why you are sticking to it. If the goal is to lose 50 pounds, and to do it in 33 weeks, why did you want this in the first place? And is the method you (or your trainer) are using relevant to your goals? Relevancy is the method and the motivation. What is keeping you doing this, and is what you're doing helping attain that goal? For our Client X, relevancy looks like a program with a combination of cardio and resistance training on training days, active recovery cardio on off days, a diet that supports this, and a frequency that keep you tracking towards your goals.
Finally, our fifth metric for a SMART goal is Timeliness, which we discussed briefly before when addressing how to measure this goal, and how often. A timely goal cannot be some unknown point in the future. It has to have a deadline, even if sometimes that has to be adjusted for life and setbacks. When we have a time limit set, or atleast time limits set for benchmarks, we push towards them quicker, and more aggressively. Unknown times, and vague timelines, invite procrastination and chip away at motivation.
So now we have a true SMART Goal: Client X will lose 50 pounds, in 33 weeks, at 1.5 pounds per week. This will be measured biweekly using a body composition scale. The program will be tailored for fat loss, including cardio, resistance training, active recovery, and calorie and macro goals. If Client X isn't seeing these results, every check in we will evaluate whether the program is effective, and whether what they are doing outside the gym is helping accelerate them towards their goals. If needed, we will adjust the timeline and the program.
Now, in the exmaple above, in my experience, there will be setbacks. No one is a machine capable of doing everything right away, and more time is often needed as they acclimate towards making their fitness goals and program a lifestyle.
But goals, while important, and ideally accomplished to the T, aren't solely there as a metric to punish yourself with - they serve as the backdrop by which we keep ourselves accountable internally and externally. Many other metrics will help keep our head in the game, and we will discuss that later in our "perspective" pillar of fitness - things like how we look, move, feel, fitting into clothes we didn't before, performance in the gym, etc. But without the goal, none of that has a ruler against which to be measured.
That closes out our Purpose pillar, after two installments in our series. We will revisit this as it applies in further pillars. But for now, my homework for you is to go take your purpose, align it to a goal, and make sure that goal is SMART - specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.
Just like a road trip (remember, I love car and trip metaphors), our purpose is our destination. Now what we need is a road map - our plan. Next week, we discuss how to pull out that map for us old folks, or open up our GPS for the younger among us, and plot how we are going to get there - the stops along the way, the means of transportation, the supplies we will need, where we will rest our heads, and who we are taking with us.
Until next time!
This has been Coach Cap, helping put the Fit… in MisFit.
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