Here’s how to write SMART goals that will actually help you achieve your fitness dreams

If you have big goals for 2025—a big deadlift, a marathon, a change in your height—I really hope you haven’t turned them into the limited pass-fail test of a SMART goal. But that doesn’t mean SMART goals are useless. You really need two types of goals: dream goals that inspire and motivate you, and SMART goals that are some kind of process goal to keep you on the path to those dreams.

Why SMART goals are different from dream goals

SMART goals have long been touted as a goal-setting life hack, but the truth is that they were invented for managers to set quotas and the like for their companies (The original “A” stood for “assignable” in the employee sense.) Their usefulness for fitness or self-improvement is fairly limited.

A SMART goalas they say in today’s fitness world, is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. In summary, this means setting a deadline by which you expect to achieve a specific measurement of an outcome. In other words, they made it a pass-fail test. And because you don’t want it fail In this pass-fail test, creating a proper SMART goal means setting the bar low. The goal must be achievable, remember? When you look at it that way, SMART goals are not that Goals in the way I would understand the word, in the sense of big dreams that inspire us to keep going.

That’s why you need a different type of goal, which I’ll call a Dream destination. A dream destination is what you Really want. It is what inspires you, whether it is attainable or not. Maybe you dream of deadlifting 500 pounds, hiking the Appalachian Trail, qualifying for the Boston Marathon, or heck, win the Boston Marathon. We will not integrate this into the SMART goal framework. But us may Set some SMART goals as benchmarks or process goals to guide our training as we work toward that big dream.

How to dream big while setting process goals

I’ve written before SMART goals are overratedbut to be honest, they provide a good framework for it Proceedings Goals. Process goals are completely within our control. They are, by definition, attainable. For example, a process goal is to go running three times a week. Eating a vegetable at every meal is a process goal. Following a program that requires you to do five sets of eight reps of deadlifts every Tuesday is a process goal.

And the point of a process goal is to get you on the path to your big dream goal. I like to imagine it like this: your dream destination is a big mountain in the distance. You know it’s there, but you don’t know exactly how far away it is or how difficult the journey will be. Your process goals are things that will keep you on the path to that mountain. Pack your bags. Put one foot in front of the other. Or as Peloton trainer Tunde Oyeneyin puts it (just before telling me I better beat my score from her last burpee class): “A goal is a desire. A standard obliges us to be responsible.” We need both.

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is that we allow ourselves to dream big. “Take a minute to run my 5K this year” is achievable, but why limit yourself to that? “Run a 5K in under 20 minutes” is a crazy big dream (especially if you’re currently at around 30 minutes), but it’s definitely worth working on. The path up this mountain may be long, but it won’t happen on its own.

How to Write SMART Goals to Support Your Dream Goals

So let’s start planning this path. As with any drive to a distant mountain, you won’t know exactly what the road looks like until you get there. So focus on what’s right in front of you and what you can control.

Here’s an example of how you can set some SMART process goals that will lead you toward a big dream may or may not be reachable. Let’s say you’re a runner and you want to be a faster runner. You could plan a trip like this:

Dream destination: Run a 5K (eventually) in 20 minutes or less.

Process goals winter/spring 2025:

1. Build my aerobic base by running a few more miles each week until I’m running 20 miles a week.

2. Do a time trial on the track on January 25th, both as a benchmark and to calculate my training speed.

3. Follow that Hal Higdon Intermediate 5K Training Program as described, including recommended strength training on Tuesday and Thursday.

4. Run the Big Local 5K in my city this March.

5. The week after that 5K run: I congratulate myself on completing it, assess my strengths and weaknesses, and decide on new process goals for summer training.

Do you see that each of these five goals is a SMART goal?

• That’s all of them Specific enough that you know exactly what you need to do to achieve these goals. (I provided a mileage and selected a specific workout program, but of course you would choose your own.)

• They are Measurable: You cover the kilometers or check off the number of programmed training sessions. On the day of the time trial and race you either show up or you don’t. And you’ll receive a target time for each so you can measure your progress more accurately.

• They are Reachable: You have full control over whether you go for a run, show up to a race, etc. (Of course, if you not (If life circumstances give you full control over this, you would formulate other goals that take those circumstances into account.)

• They are Relevant: They all put you on the path to becoming a faster 5K runner.

• They are Time bound: From this framework, you could sit down and plan every single run on your calendar for the next three or four months. (You would work backwards from the race date to find the start of the training program, etc.)

These goals define your process, and then you can reevaluate it. After the Big Local 5K, would you like to do more specific 5K training to get faster? Do you want to train for a marathon to take advantage of the base building opportunities and because you kind of like the idea of ​​a side quest? Or perhaps you find that your other life goals conflict with this one – perhaps you’d rather cut back on your running this summer to do more paddleboarding and start running again in the fall?

This way, you can still dream big, but know that you’re always on the path to those big goals – at least for as long as you want to. Shoot for the moon, and if you don’t make it, at least you’ll have built a damn good rocket along the way.