New Year, New Me? 

New Year, New Me?

I don’t tend to make New year resolutions in the traditional sense. I set goals.  The thing with goal setting is you have to make it accountable.  If you don’t have a way to make it accountable, how are you going to achieve anything?  I like the analogy of a journey. You have point A – where you are now, and point B the goal itself. If you were to just set off from point A to find point B with no map, you would invariable get lost. But if you plan the route, with way points (goals) and you make yourself accountable to those goals, then the odds are good that you find your way.

So how do we set goals? We make them SMART – Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time constrained.

How many times have you heard someone say “ I want to lose some weight”? probably loads.  But is that a smart goal? No. There’s nothing to keep the person accountable. If on the 1st of January though you were say “ I am 100kg now, I am going to lose 5kg by the 31 Mar” well then you have set a SMART goal. Its specific, you’ve laid out point A and Point B where you want to be in clear terms. You’ve given it a metric, 5kg so now it’s measurable. Is it achievable, 5kg reduction over 13 weeks is definitely achievable and realistic for the time frame and of course you have constrained it with a time frame.

The same is true of strength.  I you just say, “I want to increase my Bench”, it’s quite vague, but if you were to say, I bench 100kg now (1st of Jan) I aim to Bench 105kg by the 31 March then you have set a smart goal. 5kg on a 100kg bench in a 13 week time frame is certainly achievable. You’ve identified point A and Point B. Now all that is left is to plan that journey.

The same is true of life. Whether it’s career path, paying off debt, sporting endeavours, whatever. Setting smart goals will help you achieve it by putting the power in your hands.

If you are thinking about taking advantage of the new year to work on your fitness and you don’t really know where to start try here. If you’re already a regular trainer and you see someone new who’s struggling, why not go over and offer to give them some help – we all started somewhere. Happy new year.