Creating workout and fitness goals feeds motivation. But when you set your sights too high and have no clear plan of attack, those goals can become intimidating and demotivating forces—especially when you’re not making progress as quickly as you hoped.
GET SMART
A way to avoid being overwhelmed when setting goals is to implement the S.M.A.R.T. system, a five-step approach that can keep you focused and on track. The acronym stands for specific, measurable, achievable outcome, relevant, and time-based. If your goals can’t fit into those categories, you may need to rethink how realistic they are and consider tweaking them.
Once you’ve managed to lock and load your goals into the S.M.A.R.T. formula, you’ve created a path that will help you achieve even the loftiest of fitness goals—like the nine we’ve listed—by the end of the year.
“First determine your caloric and macronutrient needs, and then give yourself something achievable, like dropping a half pound to two pounds per week.” You might think the easy route is a crash diet. Wrong. They can be bad for your heart, slow metabolism, and leave you devoid of essential nutrients. Instead, visit a nutritionist or use an online tool that calculates your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) and approximate caloric intake.
“You can also track your progress with pictures,” he suggests. “Someone might not feel as though they’re making any progress week to week, but pictures display a visible difference and help someone avoid feeling discouraged or like they’re moving too slowly toward their goal when they’re actually moving at the ideal rate.”
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Add 10 Pounds to Your 1RM on Squats and Bench
This is going to take a lot of practice.
“If you’re doing two bench and squat workouts per week, one of them can be a normal strength routine with heavy weight and low reps to develop power,” explains Lipowski, “and the second can be about honing the skill of the movement, not about pushing yourself to failure.” He also suggests scaling back demands in other areas of training so recovery goes toward the muscles used on the bench and squat.
“The less-intense workout should be about finding weak points in the movements,” he adds. “From there you’ll want to utilize techniques like negatives, forced reps, static holds, and splitting the range of motion (ROM) in half to produce the stimulation needed to bring those areas up.”
Static holds, where you keep the weight in a fixed position for a brief period of time, have been shown to increase overall muscle mass. One 10-week study also found that static holds lead to increases in muscle mass as well as dynamic and static strength.
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Put on 5 Pounds of Lean Muscle
For motivated beginners, adding this much lean muscle shouldn’t pose too big of a problem over the course of a year.
“When you first start out all you need to do is show up at the gym, lift properly, and be consistent,” Lipowski reveals. “It’s the intermediate and advanced lifters that need to realize that even the top natural bodybuilders don’t put on more than one to two pounds of lean muscle in a year.”
In other words, making this happen will take patience and creative and experimental training methods.
“I’d suggest a ‘blitz’ for a two-week period, where you double the amount of work you do in terms of frequency and volume, and mix in other variables you might not normally use, like zone training, forced reps, negatives — basically anything that’ll cause your body to overreach what it’s accustomed to,” Lipowski says. “After two weeks, scale things back to allow the body to recover. Try a blitz two times a year.”
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Increase Your Vertical Jump by 2 Inches
You’ll need to perfect the skill of jumping in tandem with strengthening the muscles utilized in the jump itself.
“Analyze your jump form and detect how you can engage more muscles so you can move with greater force with each jump,” Lipowski suggests. “Strength will come from doing heavy resistance exercises like the squat and leg press, and calf and glute-ham raises. Plan to practice jumping every day and make sure you nail down the form on the explosive movement.”
Try putting yourself through a period of specialization.
Maybe two to three weeks where you focus on the biceps and every other bodypart takes a back seat. You can do this one to two times per year.
To exhaust the muscle you’ll need to introduce new methods of stimulation.
This can include varying angles, changing resistance levels, altering sets and reps (supersets, trisets, giant sets), and implementing advanced techniques like forced reps and negatives.
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Add 2 Inches to Your Calves
You’ll essentially have to follow the same guidelines as adding an inch to your biceps.
“Try the aforementioned methods of changing angles and resistance, but you can also break the motion into two—hitting the top half of the calve and then the bottom half,” Lipowski explains. “Static holds can also be beneficial for increasing the circumference of your calves.”
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Shave a Minute Off Your Mile Time
Lipowski suggests adding more high intensity interval training sessions where you’re progressively increasing the amount of time you’re working at maximum effort.
“Take a progressive approach to reaching your maximum effort,” he says. “So if you’re sprinting, start off with 10 sprints for ¼ mile around the track, then jog a ¼, and then go all out ¼ and jog the last quarter. Next time maybe you’re sprinting half the track, jogging ¼, and then sprinting another ¼ .”
This type of intense training can also assist in achieving goal #1 (decreasing bodyfat by 5%).
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Eat 30 Different Foods per Week
Eating a larger variety of clean, healthy foods can break monotony, boost energy levels and ensure you’re getting the proper amount of vitamins, minerals, and nutrients to help your body recover more efficiently from grueling workouts.
An easy way to achieve this is to make two colorful salads per week. Plan to feature different veggies, fruits, and proteins in each.
For example:
Salad 1: kale, chicken, tomatoes, broccoli florets, almonds, carrots, yellow peppers, and red onions.
Salad 2: baby spinach, hardboiled eggs, cucumbers, red peppers, orange peppers, sliced mushrooms, beets, cheese, and turkey.
There—you’re already at 17 foods.
Also look to diversify your protein shake ingredients: oatmeal, peanut butter, almond butter, cherries, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, pineapple, bananas, yogurt, raisins, and macadamia nuts. Now you’re up to 29 foods.
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Improve Your Overall Vascularity
To produce eye-catching veins that pop you’ll need to burn excess fat and boost muscle mass. It comes down to two things: blood volume and how lean you are.
You’ll want to stay hydrated, keep carb intake high and get your subcutaneous fat very low; look to get your bodyfat under 10%. Good complex carbohydrate sources include potatoes, beans, brown rice, peas, oatmeal, quinoa and lentils.
