Getting started · 1 min read · Updated
Set goals you'll actually hit
Big goals are great, but small weekly wins keep you going. Here's how to break a goal down so it survives a bad week.
"Get jacked" is a vibe, not a plan. A goal that's too big and too far away gets scary, and scary goals get dropped the first time life gets busy. The fix is to chop it into pieces small enough to win every week.
Three layers of goals
- The big one (6 to 12 months): what you actually want. Squat your bodyweight, drop two pant sizes, run a 5K without stopping.
- The checkpoint (4 to 8 weeks): a step that shows you're on track. Add 20 pounds to your squat, lose about 1% of body weight a week.
- The weekly habit: the thing you control. Three workouts, protein at every meal, lights out by 11.
You don't control the scale or the mirror day to day. You do control whether you showed up. Grade yourself on the habits and the results follow.
Make it measurable
Write goals as numbers you can check: workouts per week, reps on a lift, a weekly average weight. Gainsville's Today tracker ticks off a weigh-in, your eats and your lifts, which is a solid daily scoreboard.
When you fall off
Everybody misses days. Missing one workout doesn't matter; missing the next five because you felt bad about the first one does. Treat a setback like a data point: what got in the way, and what's the smallest thing you can do today? Then do that.