Get to a New You using SMART goals

“To know and not to do is to not yet know.” – Zen Proverb

Most of us have been here before. The New Year has arrived, and we have a handful of resolutions to stick to. And within a couple of weeks, most if not all of them are dead in the water. How can we move forward with our health and fitness goals this year, making transformation achievable and leaving forgettable resolutions behind?

The secret can be found in getting structured with what we hope to accomplish. A healthier, happier future awaits, and the journey starts by detailing our exact fitness goals and creating an actionable plan to succeed in the New Year.

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Business and personal coaches often ask their clients to employ a rubric known as “S.M.A.R.T. Goals” while planning for the future. You may have heard of this acronym, which represents a simple and effective process of goal-setting accompanied by strategic evaluation. For addressing our fitness goals in 2019, we’ve created a slow-burning “SSMMART” goal strategy that is ready for the gym. Make this your year to find your form and fitness at Zenergy Health Club and Spa. (Click to inquire about guest access or club membership).

First, let’s cover our two S’s, which stand for simple and specific. This means you must make your fitness objective easy to understand and narrow in scope. Test it on yourself of others by speaking it out loud. Is it clear? Is it direct? We often unconsciously set up future failures by making resolutions that are either over-complicated or slippery and vague. Name what is real and what is possible in your goals in plain yet detailed language, and you will be less likely to “let yourself off the hook” and go back to your old patterns.

Next are the M’s, which stand for measurable and meaningful. Measurable, as in, your goal isn’t real if you can’t put a number on it. If we want to get anywhere significant on our journey of transformation, we need the cold, hard facts about how we are actually doing to serve as a point of comparison.

Meaningful is pretty simple to grasp and it’s absolutely vital for success. These goals have to really resonate with you, personally. In other words, do it for yourself, first and foremost – because you are worth it! And though meaningful might equate to “difficult” at times, especially at the start of your fitness quest, choose to engage in physical exercise and activity that you find fun to help boost your sense of reward. Zenergy’s Pivot studio, cycling studio, swimming pools, and over 85 weekly classes are all great places to plug in and find out where the fun fits into your system.

A and R stand for attainable and realistic.

With fitness, assessing the attainability of one’s goals is a touch of pragmatism applied to unfettered imagination. We can achieve dreams that seem far-flung if we manage our progress one step at a time. Be wary of setting unreasonably high goals that are out-of-sequence with your very next steps. And don’t sandbag your progress by shooting for the ground instead of the stars – you do need to leap over the hurdles you’re setting up for yourself or risk finding yourself first bored and then complacent. Realistic, hard to reach but not unattainable goals help us keep moving toward a more distant point of progress.

For many individuals who have made a successful journey to whole body fitness, a personal trainer has been a secret weapon who has helped them find and chart goals which hit the sweet spot between “too hard” and “too easy”. Zenergy’s nationally-accredited personal trainer staff can help you start and finish your own fitness journey, and each trainer has a different style and areas of specialty that can be chosen to tailor-fit your needs. The right personal trainer can help you find the fire in your belly and keep you coming back for more.

And finally, there’s T, which stands for time, as in, time-valued and time-bound. How much do you value your “you time”? And if you are willing to commit to your fitness, how soon do you want to get there?

Careers, family, and relationships might seem to expand and consume our entire schedules, day in and day out. But as tough as it might seem to admit, “never having the time to work out” is simply a choice and a state of mind. To get the body and fitness level you want means making the time to value your own health above all else.

Establishing a framework for time-bound success is the last critical ingredient to devising your new goals. The journey to your best body will drag on forever if you don’t put a solid deadline on when you are committed to reaching your end goal. Most people are inclined to resist applying pressure on themselves like this, because they fear the possibility of disappointment if they fail to achieve their goals by a self-prescribed date.

But, this pressure is exactly what you want! Yes, it is infinitely more comfortable to keep your health goals to yourself – to make them general and not specific, flexible and not firm, but that comfort and safety is just an illusion masking the slippery slope to another year gone by with no real or lasting health or fitness transformation.

It may be trite, but it’s true: the only difference between a lump of coal and a diamond is the application of heat and pressure. So set yourself up with some great SMART goals this New Year, and watch a New You take shape!