Importance of Fitness Goals
If you dont know what you are trying to achieve, you will never achieve it. Not only that, your goals need to be specific , measurable and realistic. I’m no exception to this rule! In fact, the more advanced you are in fitness, the more important that setting goals becomes. A beginner can just do a haphazard workout now and then and still make progress. Intermediates can make progress just by doing a stock workout 3x/week. Advanced athletes have a much tougher time with progress even with hardcore workouts. Working harder is not a guarantee of progress, you have to workout smarter and choose your goals carefully. An advanced bodybuilder like myself has a much harder time finding areas that can be improved since I have reached my genetic potential on my major muscle groups. Its just unrealistic for someone like myself to make a goal of adding an inch to my arms or chest – not gonna happen in a kazillion years as those are genetically maxed out. The only way I could add more muscle is to find some muscle that is undertrained and hit it hard, my traps or calves for example. The other thing I could do to make my physique more competition ready is to drop my bodyfat down to 5%. (Please read about fitness goals). In any case, neither of these goals interests me as I dont plan on entering any bodybuilding contests.
My current goals are related to endurance sports, cycling and triathlon. In 2012 I am going to complete a 200 mile bike race and a half Ironman (1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike, half marathon). I have my half Ironman scheduled for June and just looked at scheduling my double century bike ride. Somewhat to my horror I found that only two races fit my schedule, one that is in less than 3 weeks (not nearly enough time to prepare) and the other is not till October. Aaaargh! What to do! I dont want to wait till October but 3 weeks isnt nearly enough time to adequately prepare for a 200 mile race.
This is a good time to point out another important aspect of setting goals – dont be afraid of failure! The journey is as important as the destination. Its better to set agressive goals and fail than to set wimpy goals and know you could have done better. Every failure is a learning experience. If registration is still open for the double century in 3 weeks then I plan on learning a lot!