The Fitness Goal Mindset
Healthy Mind, Healthy Body
Most of us have felt the uplifting effect a short walk outside can have on our moods, and that may have led to you pondering how making more significant changes in your life could make you feel. We often hear the saying healthy body, healthy mind, but have you ever considered it the other way around?
We all want to be the best versions of ourselves and sometimes set goals, which, to achieve, require us to push ourselves out of our comfort zones. Any endeavour that pushes you out of your comfort zone will usually be met first by your ingrained habits and self-beliefs, which are products of your mind and previous experiences.
For example, when has your body ever stopped you from cleaning the house, versus how often have you managed to talk yourself out of cleaning altogether? And how many times have you surprised yourself by how much you could clean once you got going? Nike forged a world-leading brand out of this predicament with the relatable slogan: “Just do it.” This suggests that we can achieve more than we expect if we learn and maintain helpful thinking habits, like those that can help us overcome our mental obstacles.
My experience in the fitness industry has repeatedly shown me that there are no shortcuts to achieving a healthy, strong, and resilient body. However, there are plenty of ways to leverage your thinking to maximise your chances of short, and long-term success.
Start by Thinking Long-term
It does not matter where you start; what matters is that you are committed to bettering yourself and staying true to that commitment for the long term. With this approach, you can achieve anything you set your mind to.
This approach gives your mind and body time to explore, rest, recover and adapt, which is important as you embark on a journey full of emotional highs and lows. The challenge is to ride those waves of emotion in a way where you can enjoy the journey and be motivated to return after every step back.
Your fitness program might be up against an extensive list of competing priorities, but by thinking long-term, you will allow yourself the time to find a sustainable balance. A balance in which you can meet all your most important needs while maintaining your fitness program.
Steady progress is the best progress, and it is the way that, in my experience, has always led to the most lasting changes.
Ownership
We all have strengths and weaknesses that are key parts of what makes us unique and special. However, we can sometimes compare ourselves to others. Comparison, so they say, is the thief of joy, and maintaining a state of joy is an essential part of achieving your long-term fitness goals.
To take ownership of our thinking is to decide where we place our focus consciously, and the best place for that focus is ourselves. Focusing on yourself and your internal thoughts and beliefs is more empowering than external comparisons as it places focus on that which is in your control.
Honing your focus this way will often require daily practice in mindfulness. Meditation and seeking emotional support through friends, family or a therapist can help you manage your thoughts in a way that keeps you motivated and on track.
Remember that you are unique, and the best version of you is you. Do not let outside influences convince you otherwise. Maintain a positive internal dialogue and trust yourself and your decision-making. Only by taking ownership will you empower yourself to make decisions, see them through the good and bad, and ultimately reach your destination.
Goals
The best goals are often the ones we set ourselves rather than those that are set for us. The former is far more likely to endure over the long term, leading to life-changing results. A good approach to mindful goal setting is to consider what is important to you and why.
“If you can, find people who have achieved your goal and ask them how they did it. Their experience, social support, and teamwork will accelerate you towards your goals faster than anything else can.”
Set goals that will make you happy from the inside out—the type of stuff you would pat yourself on the back for when nobody is watching. There’s always a purpose behind any goal, and it’s sometimes helpful to remind yourself of your purpose. Write this purpose down in a note to yourself and to keep it somewhere safe. When the going gets tough, read your note, and it might help you choose that goal again and get back on track.
It’s also important to consider what’s achievable when you commit to your goal and adjust your expectations accordingly. You can achieve almost any goal over the long term, but you must break the process down into a series of mini-goals spread over weeks/months/years.
If you need help with this, ask that friend who has already been working out for a while, your sports coach or the personal trainer who works at your gym. Those with more experience can tell you what has worked for them, which can help you understand what’s achievable with the number of hours you have to commit to your fitness goal each week.
Motivation, dedication, and consistency can be challenging, even with the most well-thought-out goals. When it comes to dragging yourself out of your warm cost bed to go the gym on a cold, rainy and windy winter morning, it’s probably going to be you alone doing the convincing, so it helps to consider what motivates you in the short and long term, and use those rewards as a tool to help you along your way.
If you were to reward yourself after each training session, you may not be able to motivate yourself to train consistently, as you can just access that reward tomorrow or the next day. Try making a ‘Reward Plan’ that distributes your rewards over time. Not only will this help keep you motivated, but it will condition your brain to work with delayed gratification. By that, I mean you must feel like you’ve earned the reward through consistent hard work; that way, you train your brain to focus over longer periods, which is what you need to achieve big goals through a series of small steps.
Teamwork
Once you know what you like and have set positive, personalised goals, surround yourself with like-minded people who share your goals (or parts of them). If you can, find people who have achieved your goal and ask them how they did it. Their experience, social support, and teamwork will accelerate you towards your goals faster than anything else can.
These people can be an invaluable source of learning, motivation, and fun, and you can share your journey with them in a way that makes you feel part of a community. That community can give you a sense of belonging, that feeling can turbocharge your progress, and you might find that you achieve your goals faster this way and push yourself further than you would have ever done otherwise.
You might love rock climbing, so find a climbing buddy. Love powerlifting? Find somebody who has competed before and train with him/her a few times a week. Want to see how fast you can run? Get involved with your local athletics club. If you want that chiselled look, seek the advice of somebody who knows about nutrition. You can easily find these places and people online or ask through your friends. Likely, they’re just as eager to meet you as you are them, so reach out.
Balance
Once you’re in your groove, you will start to notice results, and your motivation for your goals will grow. You might be tempted, in this case, to devote more time to your fitness program, but this extra work may not offer the marginal gains you were hoping for. While it is true that your body will become stronger, will be able to recover faster and do more than it did last month, sometimes the unexpected can happen.
Imagine this: you are 100% dedicated to your fitness program and spend almost all your free time training, then suddenly, you need to take a 6-week break for an injury or spend two weeks in bed thanks to a nasty virus. When you’re hyperfocused on your fitness program at the expense of everything else, setbacks like this can feel like bigger catastrophes than they are. Your mind can trick you into believing you have lost everything, which is untrue, and often, all we need is a bit of outside perspective to bring us back on track.
Your personal goals are important to you, and it can be empowering to feel yourself getting better, but it’s still worth making time for your other hobbies and those you love. Friends and family are especially important; they are the ones you will celebrate with at the end and will help you stay grounded. They will give you a pick-me-up, or bit of perspective when you need it most.
Even if that means skipping a training session or binging on a takeaway, it’s worth it, as it will keep you on a stable and focused track towards your long-term fitness goals while smoothing out the bad times and keeping the good times rolling.
Patience
Everybody is unique and will reach their goals at different speeds. It may take your friend four weeks of training to add 20kg to their squat strength while you manage to add 5kg. But it may also take your friend eight weeks of training to run a 5k at your pace, which you already do easily.
Recovery is essential to your progress, and your natural recovery rate will differ from everybody else’s. It will be slowest at the start of your fitness journey and will take some time to speed up. This is because your muscles and central nervous system need time to adapt to the new stresses you are putting yourself through.
As part of this process, you may notice that you feel hungrier throughout the day, your muscles are sore (sometimes very sore!), and/or that you’re sleeping longer. Take extra care of your body in this phase by feeding it regularly with nutritious food, drinking plenty of water, booking a regular massage and sleeping well. Doing so will ensure that your body will start (and continue) to make positive changes towards feeling stronger, more energetic and resilient. But this will take time, whether three months, six months or one year. You must be patient and give your body a chance to do that alongside the other 128748196258615 biological processes it must perform daily.
It can be tempting to keep checking the scales or look at yourself in the mirror, as they can provide immediate feedback on your progress. However, your weight and appearance can be subject to numerous variables and rapidly appearing/disappearing factors. For example, you’re likely to be lighter when you wake up than when you go to sleep because, after a long sleep, your body is fasted and probably dehydrated. You also may look bloated or less defined during certain times of the month due to temporary hormonal changes, such as those resulting from your period.
Feedback that is so volatile is not the best benchmark for your long-term progress. Short-term feedback mechanisms, used in place of long-term mechanisms, can lead to you pushing yourself too hard, too quickly, to see one extra (or fewer) kg on the scales or line of definition in the mirror. Ultimately, this will only result in excessive fatigue or injury, which may lead you back to where you started again.
Take your time. Remember, It’s a marathon, not a sprint. It’s better to take measurements and record them over time when working on a long-term goal. What you should be aiming for, once you connect the dots, is a positive trend. Your job is to keep that positive trend going through all its ups and downs, which ultimately requires patience.
Choices
Scenario 1:
You’ve been stuck in a stuffy room working towards your deadline all week and only had time for one run. It’s Friday. You finish early today and can’t wait to get outside for a while to get some fresh air and your heart pumping. You’ve got that chicken you’ve been looking forward to waiting in the fridge and a couple of episodes of your favourite series to catch up on.
Your friend has other ideas. They want to get ready for a big night out and want you to come, too. In the back of your mind, you think that the last thing you want is to end your hard week with a brutal hangover, and you would prefer instead to go out tomorrow night when most of your friends are. You’ve decided to go, and your friend has had a blast, but you fell asleep halfway through on the dance floor. You’ve woken up midday on your friend’s sofa, fully dressed, cheesy chips still on your lap and burger sauce down your shirt. You feel like shit, and now you’re not even looking forward to going out tonight like you had planned initially.
There’s nothing wrong with spontaneous nights out (sometimes they’re the best), and your personal goals shouldn’t always take priority. But try to emphasise listening to your mind and body and making the right choices. Don’t let FOMO, your friends or other commitments dictate your life in a way that’s affecting your well-being.
Scenario 2:
You’ve made a significant effort to cook and eat healthy meals for a few weeks; you feel like you’re flying towards your goal for the first time in a long time. You even start doing the maths in your head that if you keep this up, you will reach your goal in half the time you initially expected.
But it’s your friend’s birthday tonight, and your other friend who loves baking has made enough cakes for all your birthdays combined. Double chocolate, cream, sparklers, you name it. It’s all part of a 3-course meal with wine and Champagne. You’re in for a multi-thousand-calorie feast, and there’s no way of avoiding it.
Relax. It’s fine. Eat the cake, drink the wine, and enjoy yourself—don’t beat yourself up about it. Like I said earlier, you have to maintain balance and be patient. You’re in this for the long term, and you’re going to wake up the next day after your (well-deserved) feast, ready and more motivated than ever to eat well next week and the week after that, and you will. It hasn’t all gone to waste just because you decided to enjoy yourself for one night. You’re still in total control and doing a fantastic job.
If you make better choices and stick to good habits for at least 4 out of the seven days of the week, you are still moving positively and steadily towards your goal.
Failure
You’re not going to get it right every time.
You will train for six weeks to run a 45-minute 10k and finish in 52. You’re going to tell yourself that this time next year, you will be squatting 100kg and only make it halfway. You will be in the physical form of your life and suddenly have to take 8-weeks out for a sprained ankle or shoulder injury. You will train all year to make it into the varsity team, and it just might not happen.
“Your first positive step is to take ownership of that failure and reflect on the insights you’ve gained about yourself. Be proud of what you’ve done well, and take note of those areas that can be improved. We don’t always know how to fix our weak spots, so be prepared to ask for help”
Get over it.
You are going to try things, and you are going to fail, and failure can sometimes be due to things outside of your control. That failure may have denied you what you wanted at that moment, and you can use your time mourning the pleasure it would have given you for as long as you like, but that won’t help you.
Your first positive step is to take ownership of that failure and reflect on the insights you’ve gained about yourself. Be proud of what you’ve done well, and take note of those areas that can be improved. We don’t always know how to fix our weak spots, so be prepared to ask for help where you need it. You should seek the support of your friends, family and professionals to help you overcome your barriers. It might take some time to put new foundations in place, so be patient and allow yourself the time to do things properly.
Finally, make a plan and start doing it. You might have to change your plan along the way, and that’s fine; keep going. Once you have made the right changes, you will fly past your old goal and be ready for your next big challenge, stronger and more motivated than ever.
Learning
Finally and perhaps most importantly, every part of your journey can and should be a learning opportunity. You will learn something new about yourself in each high and each low, which will help you pursue your long-term goals.
You can also take valuable lessons from those you meet along the way; however, don’t forget that what works for their fitness (or goals) may not work for you. Stick to what you are trying to achieve and only take the advice that might help you accomplish that.
Be a relentless student of your hobby. Subscribe to good blogs, follow leaders in the field, read good books, and don’t be afraid to try new things. The more you know, the better you can train, and the faster you will see results.