Nike™. Their marketing team created an amazingly brilliant, profoundly simple slogan: Just Do It™. Powerful as a slogan. Plus it’s good advice.
If only it was that simple. How many of us have had a start-stop relationship with exercise over the years? I have…and fitness was my chosen profession.
Sometimes telling yourself to “just do it” isn’t enough. Life happens and you get sidetracked. Or bored. Or motivation wanes because you’re not seeing improvement fast enough.
As with any endeavor, setting a goal and creating an intention can help you stay focused, and push through that finish line.
Four steps for getting to your goal:
1. Get clear on whether your goal is weight loss, muscle gain health driven or all of the above. Sometimes on the surface people think their desire is to be healthy, not just lose weight. Then suddenly the focus shifts to weight loss, and they begin to do things that don’t promote—or worse, are detrimental to—whole health but are a quick fix answer to weight loss.
2. Use the Specific Measurable Attainable Relevant Timely/Time Bound (S.M.A.R.T.) goal formula when setting your goal. It’s important to create a measuring stick with which to evaluate your progress so you can course correct along the way, if necessary. Additionally, using the S.M.A.R.T principle ensures your goal is realistic, and can be an integral part of maintaining motivation throughout your process.
A great example happened when I worked in a corporate fitness center. A client came in and declared she wanted to lose 30 pounds. It was a reasonable thing. Then she shared the timeframe. It was a little aggressive, so I suggested that 20 would be more doable in a healthy way.
It was Specific (weight loss) and Measurable (20 pounds) and Time Bound (8 weeks). She proceeded to share that she could only come into the gym twice a week to do 30 minutes of cardio. She also stated she couldn’t change the way she was eating as her fiancé and child would never go for it, and she didn’t have the energy/desire to cook 2 separate meals. We got derailed at Attainable. To set yourself up for success, make certain your goal meets every criteria of the S.M.A.R.T goal structure.
3. Create your training schedule. Choose the days and times you’re going to work out, and mark it in your calendar. In ink. Design your schedule so that it supports your goal, helping to create the success in accomplishing it. And once you have it on the calendar, honor those appointments with yourself!
4. Plan your workouts based on your goals ahead of time. I often would see people come in to the gym and meander from machine to machine with no real plan of action. To get the results you desire requires you to be focused and purposeful. If you aren’t sure what types of workouts or exercises will help you reach your goal, do some research or consider hiring a professional to help in your endeavors.
These steps help to create the goal and the structure that will keep you on track and on task, setting yourself up for success. But there is one piece missing: setting an intention. Setting the intention begins with the desire for better health.
Simply having a deep desire sets the ball in motion, but requires clarity. To say “I think I want to lose weight,” lacks conviction. To create a clear intention, you want to know with every fiber of your being that it’s a done deal.
When you set your S.M.A.R.T. goal, you are clear in your intention, that finish line is in sight. And from the moment you set pen to paper, like the ads command, you know you’ll “Just Do It.”