Pages

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Goals: Be SMART

Goal setting is a pretty popular target among our self improvement culture.  It should be, because nothing sets you on the path to success like deciding what success looks like and then working hard to get there.  There is something almost magical about thoughtfully choosing the outcome you want, writing it down, and then formulating a plan to make it a reality.  Almost nothing in life is more motivating than real, measurable progress towards a goal.  It will get you out of bed early in the morning to train hard no matter what, when nothing else will.  If goal setting is the process of moving from point A to point B, you need to figure out both spots.  Where are you?  Where are you going?  There are two problems I've encountered working with trainees, they don't know where they are and they don't know where they are going.  Since they don't know where they are starting from, it's hard to set concrete goals.  Because their goals are nebulous, they never know if the goal has been achieved.  That's a shortcut to giving up.

Instead, you're going to set some SMART goals so you can measure your progress and know when your goal has been achieved.  This concept isn't brand new, a few guys (George Doran, Arthur Miller, and James Cunningham) published it in 1981 in Management Review.  (P.S. Why haven't you been setting smart goals since then?)  So let's examine this acronym a little more closely before looking at a few examples of how you can apply this principle to your training.

Your goals should be:

S- Specific
M- Measurable
A- Achievable
R- Relevant
T- Time-bound

Specific

I've written before about people wanting to get "in shape."  I often retort that round is a shape, you need to be more specific.  I would be willing to bet 100 burpees that many of your goals for training and performance are not specific.  Examples I have heard recently, "I want to get bigger (or faster or smaller or stronger)."  That seems pretty specific, right?  Wrong!  So how would I make those more specific?  Instead of I want to get bigger, I want to gain 10 lbs of lean muscle.  Instead of faster, I want to run a 40 yard dash faster than my current time of 5.1 seconds or a sub-20 minute 5k.  Instead of I want to be smaller, I want to lose 10 lbs of fat.  Instead of stronger, I want to set a 5 lb personal record on my squat.  You could be even more specific than that, but saying exactly what you want to achieve makes it real.

Measurable

This is a safety net for your specific goal requirement.  If your goal is not specific, you cannot measure it.  If your goal is measurable, then you know when you have achieved it.  For example: I know my weight gain goal has been accomplished when the scale tells me that I have gained 10 lbs.  It is unambiguous and simple to measure.  This is why "I want to get in shape" is such a terrible goal when left on its own.  How will you ever know if you're in shape?  There is nothing to measure.  Making your goal measurable gives you clear data points to track your progress, keeping you motivated to continue working towards your goal over time.

Achievable

Let's be reasonable here.  If your goal is to get 6 inches taller in the next 6 months, your goal is not likely to be achievable unless you're a 13 year old boy, and even then it's a stretch.  Making the goal achievable puts the ball firmly in your court.  You should set goals that rely on you, not on what other people can do for you.  Following the weight gain example, I can control what I eat and drink.  It will take discipline and planning to make sure that I eat and drink enough of the right things, but doing that is totally achievable for most people.  Simply choose goals that you believe you can meet that are above simple performance standards but are not impossible.  It is better to set a series of smaller, achievable goals and knock them down one by one than to set a goal for the end state you are trying to achieve and make it there in one jump.  Training is a process, whether you want to be faster, lose body fat, increase lean body mass, or simply run your first marathon.  Trying to accomplish everything at once is a recipe for failure.

Relevant

I want to make sure that my goals actually fit in with what is important to me.  If I set a goal to watch 96 hours of television without stopping, that is not relevant to health, fitness, or performance.  I need to choose goals that make sense and are relevant to my overall direction for training and life.  Continuing in the weight gain example, if I want to gain weight, setting a goal to read a book a week is not going to help me gain weight.  Instead I need to set goals to eat a certain amount of protein per day based on the body weight I want to achieve.  My goals need to jive with what I am trying to accomplish.  This can be a tricky one, and sometimes benefits from a coach.  It would be easy to assume that reading about nutrition or searching forums about training programs would be a relevant to my goal of putting on lean mass.  Most of the time, that's simply not the case.  Try to use Occam's Razor when making decisions about what is relevant to your goals.  Choose the simplest path towards what you want to accomplish, the more complicated it gets, the less likely you are to do what needs to be done.

Time-bound

Set a deadline.  If your goal is open-ended there is no sense of urgency.  You will likely allow that goal to be crowded out by the general business of daily life.  When there is a deadline, you know you have to make daily progress in order to make your goal a reality.  If I wanted to add 10 lbs of lean mass to my frame, I would set the goal for 6 months or a year so that I am motivated to work towards my goal every single day.  It's also important to remember that simply doing the next right thing that will move you towards your goals day after day is the real secret to making progress.   The older I get, the more I realize that I need to get all I can done each day because there are less and less days ahead of me to spread out the work.  That deadline will keep you honest!

Examples

After all that, here are a few examples of SMART goals based around some of the most common goals I see.

I want to lose some weight.  UN-SMART.  I want to lose 10 lbs of body fat in the next 6 months.  SMART.

I want to gain some weight.  UN-SMART.  I want to gain 10 lbs of lean body mass in the next 12 months.  SMART.

I want to be faster.  UN-SMART.  I want to run a 5k in 21 minutes at my next race which is 12 weeks out.  SMART.

I want to be stronger. UN-SMART.  I want to increase my total by 50 lbs at my next powerlifting meet which is 16 weeks out.  SMART.

Can you see what makes the difference between the UN-SMART examples and the SMART ones?  We take a generalized, unspecific goal and make it specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely.  We make it SMART!  I encourage you to set the following goal right now: "I will spend 30 minutes to 1 hour before this week is over thinking about and setting at least 2 SMART goals that will positively effect my training and life outside of the gym."

If you enjoyed this article, please take a moment to click one of the little buttons below and share it with your friends.  There are a lot of other posts you might find interesting, and if you'd like to get updates in your email, simply enter it in the window to the right.  You can also join our group on facebook to see what others are saying about goals.  Lastly you can follow me on twitter and instagram @disruptivefit to see what's going on in training and life.  As always thanks for reading!

2 comments: