New year – New goals: How to make the most of your goal setting
Happy New Year, everyone! While many of us are making our new year’s resolutions, I thought I would take a moment to discuss how we can get the most out of our year, by making smart goals.
It comes as no surprise that goal setting has been shown to be a meaningful way to create behavioral change and increase physical activity (1). That said, finding the right balance between setting a challenging goal and setting an impossible goal can be tough, and goals that are too challenging may even be counterproductive. Indeed, research has shown that setting a goal with too high of an intensity may actually reduce physical activity, as the barrier to entry is too high and workouts are therefore skipped (2).
So, what can I do?
Enter SMART goals. The idea of SMART goals has been around for over 40 years, originally developed as a helpful guide for business management, but has since been adapted into various settings, with backing from multiple medical agencies. In fact, the American College of Sports Medicine recommends setting SMART goals as part of their training (3).
SMART goals are popular, because it represents a memorable acronym for goal setting. Goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound. For example, a SMART goal might be to spend 150 minutes per week, running or cycling, averaged each month. Here I will easily be able to measure my success, because I have clearly defined what I need to do. Compare this with “I plan to run more in 2025.” This goal is too vague, making it tougher to gauge success and so easier to delay a workout.
So how can we make sure out goals are ‘realistic’ or ‘achievable?’ Well, this is where Athlytic shines. In the workouts tab, you can easily see your recent activities, time spent with each activity over the past month, how may workouts you’ve done over the past month, comparisons with prior months, etc.
Take a look at these values and reflect on them. If your past month was tough (but clearly attainable, as you have already achieved it), consider making that your baseline goal. Otherwise, consider adding 5 to 10% and setting that as your new goal.
Okay, I’ve got my goal. Anything else?
Setting you goal is important, but as we’ve learned from all of our sports, the effort doesn’t stop there. SMART goals are not infallible, and we can always use additional motivation. Additionally, things like injury, illness, detraining, and other life events may get in the way of our goals. It’s important to understand that goals can be changed and adapted, and that this is not a failure, but rather an opportunity to re-evaluate and reset your goals. This also means if your goals start to become too easy, you should re-evaluate and reset them too.
I am a big fan of the idea of ‘reflective iteration’ and ‘self-experimentation (4).’ The idea of self-experimentation is to create a hypothesis (I think 150 minutes per week will be a tough goal), create your plan (I’m going to run or cycle for 30 minutes, 5x per week), and then review the results. As I discussed before, use Athlytic to look back on your previous month, reflect on the results of your ‘experiment.’ Was it tough enough? Was it too difficult? Would 3 days of 50 minutes have worked better for your schedule?
Take these answers, review your data, and set a new goal for the upcoming month.
Stay active. Stay Healthy. And let’s achieve our goals. Cheers to a productive and exciting 2025.
Sources and Further Readings:
1. McEwan D, Harden SM, Zumbo BD, Sylvester BD, Kaulius M, Ruissen GR, et al. The effectiveness of multi-component goal setting interventions for changing physical activity behaviour: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Health Psychol Rev. 2016;10(1):67–88.
2. Perri MG, Anton SD, Durning PE, Ketterson TU, Sydeman SJ, Berlant NE, et al. Adherence to exercise prescriptions: Effects of prescribing moderate versus higher levels of intensity and frequency. Health Psychol. 2002;21(5):452–8.
3. Medicine AC of S. ACSM’s Exercise Testing and Prescription. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins; 2017. 663 p.
4. Xu K, Yan X (Erica), Ryu M, Newman MW, Arriaga RI. Understanding the Effect of Reflective Iteration on Individuals’ Physical Activity Planning. In: Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems [Internet]. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery; 2024 [cited 2025 Jan 5]. p. 1–17. (CHI ’24). Available from: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3641937
