Goals are vital. Allow me to explain; goals are extremely important because setting and subsequently achieving goals gives the brain an immense sense of satisfaction.

This satisfaction is crucial for maintaining a regimen. It’s crucial because completing a task makes us feel good. Achieving goals is a the same as completing a task and so we feel good after doing it. Therefore, having goals allow for an incentive for sticking to a regimen (in addition to for our health of course).

Now, why is maintaining a regimen important? Well, it’s very common for people to start the first week or two out strong but then lose steam and cease to work out. This cessation of working out leads them back to square one. At this point, they feel unmotivated to pursue a healthier body. If you’ve ever wondered why New Year’s resolutions involving going to the gym don’t ever seem to work, this is why. In short, maintaining a regimen is important to allow for forward progress. In turn, forward progress leads to results which then lead into another goal. This is one of the best types of vicious cycles out there.

While goals may not seem like the most glamorous part of a fitness journey, they are equally as important as the rest of it. It’s for this reason that knowing how to set a good goal is pertinent. Often times, people tend to set their goals too high. This then leads to a failure in achieving the goal. At that point, there wasn’t really any benefit to making the goal in the first place. To combat this, it’s good to make the first few goals easy to achieve.

Let’s say someone wants to lose 50 pounds in five months. This averages out to 10 pounds a month. The main goal can be broken into five (or more) different goals. The first being ten pounds in one month. The second being ten pounds in the following month, and so on. These smaller, easier to digest goals allow for more immediate satisfaction. This then leads to a craving for even more satisfaction via more goals. That being said, the goals shouldn’t be too easy either. If the goal is too easy, it won’t feel like an accomplishment because it was simply too easy.

All in all, setting reachable yet challenging goals is vitally important to any fitness journey. Much like the foundation of a house, goals allow for a much more successful product at the end of the day.