Motivation Essentials and Goal-Setting

Brace yourselves for a bit of a longer than the usual article, however, totally worth reading!

Before starting to look deeper into the topic, it is worth mentioning that every reader knows exactly what their goal is and why they want to achieve it. It is very often when individuals are diving into a pursuit of a goal, without knowing why exactly they are doing such a thing. For instance, going to the gym, purely because you have some fat around the belly is usually an insignificant reason that will guarantee success. Nevertheless, this principle works for every aspect of life, it does not necessarily have to be based around exercising.

Introduction:

Although exercise has numerous benefits, only a small percentage of the world population is participating in any sort of it on a regular basis.

The UK’s physical activity guidelines suggest 150 minutes of moderate activity, such as cycling; two or more days a week in which the major muscle groups (e.g. chest, legs, etc.) are trained, using resistance, or 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity such as running.

Above guidelines mentioned simply in order to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Nowadays, the number of people regularly participating in any sort of exercise is increasing, however, only the minority of those people manage to adhere to regular exercising patterns. Many barriers such as time, motivation levels, nobody to exercise with are usually used as an excuse in order to avoid physical activity.

The aim of this article will be to provide the readers with a few tools that can be implemented within our daily lifestyle and how to use them in order to maintain high motivation levels in and even outside the gym, therefore, ensuring adherence.

Barriers:

• Lack of fitness knowledge
• Lack of time
• Goal-setting (will be covered in greater details below)
• Lack of confidence – self-efficacy (also to be covered in greater details below)

How to overcome barriers:

Goal-setting:

Goal-setting is important not only for what you want to achieve in fitness, but also for everything in life. It is very simple, straightforward, and yet, very effective if done correctly. It can be a short, medium, or long-term goal.

Why use goal-setting?

It is a very effective way of measuring progress and having regular checkpoints to ensure that one is heading in the right direction. It can be different for every individual, as it strongly depends on one’s values. For instance, losing 10 kilograms of body weight within a year is the long-term goal.

Short and medium-term goals will be just used as checkpoints within the next year in order to ensure that one’s still on the right track. If we spread 10 kilograms of weight loss within 12 months, this will result in 0.8kg to be lost each month (short-term goal). Furthermore, 6 months into the year can be the medium-term checkpoint, in which one optimally should have lost 5kg of bodyweight.

Now, in theory, this seems quite simple, however, a big percentage of the population fails to succeed with their long-term goals (in and outside of the gym), hence, tips on how to use goal-setting adequately will be discussed below.

How to use goal-setting. Introduction to start goal-setting:

Specificity

Specificity in goals is vital for success. Challenging goals tend to be more motivational, hence increasing the likelihood of success. Nevertheless, too much of a challenge (unrealistic goal) would most likely result in a failure to achieve, therefore, contributing towards disappointment.

This directly correlates with a lack of fitness knowledge. The main reason being is that not having adequate training and/or a macronutrient plan that is the foundation of one’s path to achieving their goal, will most likely result in them being unsuccessful in that regard. Being unsuccessful will, therefore, result in disappointment. Eventually, if disappointment is present, relapse is highly likely. This is explained well in the picture below: 

Picture 1.