Setting Goals for Fit Living - My Health & Fitness

Everywhere you go there are advertisements for fast food restaurants, enticements from friends wanting you to join them for a happy hour rife with beer and wings, and endless other potential excuses to skip your workouts and put junk into your body that will only make it soft, unattractive while also compromising your health.

With all of the outside pressures placed on us to abandon our healthy convictions we must always be prepared to combat these would-be distractions and stay committed to living a fit and healthy lifestyle.

Have you ever known someone that made significant improvements to their physique? I?m not talking about someone that lost a measly ten pounds. I?m talking about someone that went from fat (or obese) to being lean and fit.

In reality these people are a rare breed. It is more likely for you to know someone who has been committed to a healthy lifestyle for as long as you?ve known them than it is for you to know someone that transitioned into a healthy lifestyle.

Either way, the point I want to make is how powerful a little preparedness and planning will go towards enabling you to live out your desire of being fit. You?ve probably heard the old axiom, ?an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure?.? The same is true here.

Talk to a guy or gal you know that has made significant improvements to their physique and they will tell you that planning was an integral part of their success. Such people plan by:

• Packing healthy meals for work
• Structuring their schedules so they can get in their weekly workouts
• Sacrificing a certain amount of social time
• Spending more time cooking and preparing their own meals
• Keeping a training log to track their progress in the gym

I think you get the point.

These individuals figured out, one way or another, that without proper planning they would be susceptible to outside influences and fail to reach their goals.

Actually, I?m getting a little ahead of myself, because before the planning phase can begin there must first be a goal to plan for.

Be a Goal Setter

Setting goals is essential for any successful business or entrepreneur and the same is true for the fitness minded individual as well.

It has been well said that he who aims at nothing inevitably hits it. In other words, if you haven?t given yourself a goal (or something specific to achieve) you can?t expect to achieve much at all.

If you want to improve your physique, start by setting a goal. The goal should be specific, measureable, attainable, realistic and time-bound. This is known in the business world as a SMART goal and it applies perfectly to those with a desire to improve their physique or level of fitness.

Having a goal not only gives you something to strive for, but also gives you the ability to plan.

Knowing what you want to achieve is great, but without a plan to achieve it you aren?t going to get very far.

For instance, if your goal was to lose fifty pounds of fat you?d want to plan by implementing diet and exercise into your schedule. These would be broad, high-level descriptions, which you would then drill down into.

So your diet planning would be refined further by describing how you would go about eating to reach your goal of losing fifty pounds of fat.

This may be something like cutting out carbs 5 days a week, limiting your calories to 1,500 per day, etc. But it would be a specific plan with the sole purpose of progressing you toward your end goal.

You?d then go into the same kind of specifics with your training regimen.

This type of detailed planning can be a little overwhelming for some, which is why many personal trainers and nutritionists have very healthy businesses.

Help for Setting and Reaching Your Goals

There?s absolutely nothing wrong with hiring someone to concoct a plan for you that will enable you to reach your goals. There are coaches and mentors in just about every field and finding a good one to show you how to reach your goals will save you loads of time, countless headaches, and will be worth every penny.

Summing up everything we?ve discussed?

You need to determine what it is you?d like to improve on your physique, set a SMART goal, make the necessary plans to achieve your goal, and see it through to completion.

In case you aren?t sure of a goal you might want to strive for, here are some examples of SMART personal fitness goals to help get your brain moving in that direction:

• Increase my bench pressing strength by fifty pounds in six months
• Lose twenty pounds of fat in twelve weeks
• Gain ten pounds of muscle in four months
• Improve my mile-run time by thirty seconds in four weeks

Hopefully the examples above have made the gears in your head to start turning and have given you some ideas regarding a personal goal you?d like to achieve in the coming months.

I?d like to leave you with a final thought?

Living a life without goals is living a life without purpose.

Start living a life of purpose today by making the decision to give your health, fitness and physical appearance the attention they deserve. Then, set a realistic goal, map out a plan to reach it (or hire someone to do it for you), and relentlessly pursue your goal until you?ve achieved all that you set out to accomplish.

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Tagged as: goals, healthy lifestyle

Source: http://www.myhealthandfitness.net.au/setting-goals-for-fit-living/

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