Alice: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
The Cheshire Cat: “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”
Alice: “I don’t much care where.”
The Cheshire Cat: “Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go.”

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

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The idea of goal setting may seem tedious, but how many people do you see in the gym week after week who look exactly as they did six months or a year ago?

Whilst there is nothing inherently wrong with that, I’d expect most people who walk into a gym are doing so with the aim of making a physical improvement of some kind.

The problem is that without having an idea of where you want to go and a plan to get there, we tend to see little progress, often leading us to switch programmes and diets before we’ve given them chance.

For many people the only thing missing is 10 minutes spent understanding a few golden rules and identifying what it is we really want to achieve.

If all this this sounds like a routine you go through as regularly as the aforementioned cardio bunny, hopefully the following guide will help you set some simple targets and get you on the right path.

Golden Rules

• Understand that you essentially have three options:
  • Build muscle (through a calorie surplus and weight training)
  • Maintain current weight
  • Lose fat (calorie deficit)

It is virtually impossible for most people to build muscle and lose weight at the same time. Which leads to the second golden rule…

• Pick one main goal and stick to it.

It’s so important to think about what you want to achieve before you start. Too often people will set out to build muscle, but after two weeks decide they’ve put on a few extra pounds as a result and don’t like it, so switch to a fat loss programme. Keep the goal the goal!

For example, if you want to build muscle and lose fat, realise this requires a phase of muscle building followed by a fat loss phase. This does not happen over the course of a few weeks. Instead, pick one goal – the one most important to you – and stick to it. In this example it may be that it’s November and weight loss is not so much of an issue for the next three months as you layer up against the winter, so you start a muscle building routine. Come early Spring, you can switch to a fat loss programme to get you beach ready for Summer.

• Be patient.

I cannot stress this enough.

I get it, you want results – fast! But progress doesn’t happen overnight. There will be weeks where you don’t get stronger or you don’t lose weight, the key is recognising this is fine. If you did get stronger or lose weight every week, in six months’ time you would be a superhuman (or a skeleton!).

Too often people see a lack of immediate progress as failure and look for magic alternatives, usually switching programmes or diets or giving up entirely. But know this: there is no magic diet, app, supplement or whatever, the key is consistency over time. Most guys would snap your hand off if you offered them the chance to add 10kg to their bench in a year’s time, equally a lot of women would delight at a five per cent drop in body fat over the same period, yet if we don’t achieve these targets in six weeks we quit and blame the programme!

Conclusion

Now you have this knowledge you can start to set out some goals and a decent strategy on how to achieve them.

Equally, if you don’t know what your ideal weight looks like, or how strong you’d like to get, keep it simple: make the goal to build a habit of getting to the gym on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Or going for a long walk on a Sunday. Or eating clean five/six days a week. The choices are endless and can be adapted to your own needs and demands, just remember to set realistic targets to what you are trying to achieve and then stick to your plan!