It’s important to have goals and, without them, working on any project can become really hard.
So what is helpful and what type of goals are not necessarily productive or realistic?
Here are 5 fitness goals that you may want to ditch and fine tune how you set your goals over the course of your fitness adventure:
Being perfect
Having standards of perfection when it comes to your fitness can be draining, unrealistic and let’s face it.. demotivating!
Being healthy is not about having everything looking a certain way, fitting a category or even measured with exact specifics with each workout. Making better choices, following through, even on those days when you don’t feel like you have it in you and staying consistent, is.
Exercising every day
Getting into a good routine with regular exercise is fantastic, but to set your goals to exercising intensely every day without some much-needed rest can be unhelpful.
Overtraining symptoms can occur when there is too much load placed on the approach to exercise. Your rest days are just as important for your health as the days when you are working hard.
Also read: 5 Reasons You’re Tired all the Time
The wrong type of exercise
Aiming to religiously follow a type of exercise that is not conducive to your goals and/or your body type can lead to much frustration, and might result in missing the goal altogether.
For example, if you’re built like a marathon runner, but want to get savvy with powerlifting as a short-term goal, this could be considered to be the type of goal that would be far trickier than if you had a heavier/stronger physique from the outset.
Looking like a celebrity
It’s great to be inspired to rock a body like your favourite fitness model or celebrity, but we must be realistic about how likely this is to achieve.
The person in the photos may have not taken the best approach to reaching that condition or looking that way.
Extreme dieting and unhelpful schedules with exercise is never a healthy way to look a certain way, so be mindful of this and trust that a sensible routine to your own journey is always putting you on track for optimum health and fitness.
You are you, so being the best version of this is brilliant.
Spot reduction
Striving towards a rippling six pack when you have just started out and have weight to lose is a common fitness goal and to be honest, a really unrealistic one for many people in the early stages of training.
To work on losing weight from just one area of the body (spot reduction) is not possible, but taking a balanced approach to nutrition and exercise as the overview puts you on track to achieving a leaner physique and ultimately heading in this direction without having to focus on it.
In summary – be realistic about your goals and give yourself the opportunity to NAIL them!
