How to Write SMART Goals That Will Actually Help You Achieve Your Fitness Dreams

If you have big ambitions for 2025—a big deadlift, a marathon, changing your body size—I really hope you haven’t turned them into a limited, testing SMART goal. But that doesn’t mean SMART goals are useless. You actually need two types of goals: dream goals to inspire and motivate you, and SMART goals, which are a type of process goal and keep you on track to those dreams.

How do SMART goals differ from dream goals?

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

A SMART goal , as it is called in the fitness world today, is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. Taken together, this means that you set a deadline by which you expect to achieve a specific outcome. In other words, you’ve turned it into a test of success. And since you don’t want to fail this test, creating a proper SMART goal means you need to set the bar low. The goal must be achievable, remember? When you look at it this way, SMART goals are not goals as I 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 goal . A dream goal is something you really want. It’s what inspires you, whether it’s achievable or not. You might dream of deadlifting 500 pounds, or hiking the Appalachian Trail, or qualifying for the Boston Marathon, or hell, winning the Boston Marathon. We are not going to include this in the SMART goal framework. But we can set some SMART goals as benchmarks or process goals that will guide our learning as we achieve that big dream.

How to Dream Big While Setting Process Goals

I’ve written before that SMART goals are overrated , but frankly, they provide a good basis for process goals . Process goals are things that are completely under our control. They are achievable by definition. For example, jogging three times a week is a process goal. Eating vegetables at every meal is the goal of the process. Following a program that instructs you to do five sets of eight reps of deadlifts every Tuesday is the goal of the process.

And the purpose of the process is to set you on the path to your big Dream Goal. I like to think of it this way: your dream destination is a big mountain in the distance. You know it’s there, but you don’t know exactly how far it is or how difficult the journey will be. Your process goals are what will keep you on your way to that mountain. We pack our suitcases. We put one foot in front of the other. Or as peloton instructor Tunde Oyenein says (right before telling me I better beat my time on her last round of burpees): “A goal is a desire. The standard requires us to be accountable.” We need both.

I cannot stress enough how important it is that we allow ourselves to dream big. “Reducing your 5K time by one minute this year” is achievable, but why limit yourself to that? “Running a 5K in under 20 minutes” is a hell of a dream (especially if you’re currently running about 30 minutes), but it’s worth working for. The path to this mountain may be long, but it will not go on its own.

How to Write SMART Goals to Support Your Dream Goals

So let’s start blazing this trail. As with any journey to a distant mountain, you won’t know what the road is like until you get there. So focus on what is 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 help you achieve a big dream that may or may not be achievable. Let’s say you’re a runner and you want to run faster. You can plan your trip as follows:

Dream goal: Run a 5K in 20 minutes or less (someday).

Process goals for winter/spring 2025:

1. Strengthen your aerobic base by running a few more miles each week until I am running 20 miles a week.

2. Do a time trial on the track on January 25th, both as a guide and so I can calculate my training pace.

3. Follow Hal Higdon’s Intermediate 5K training program as written, including recommended strength training on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

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

5. Next week after your 5K: Congratulate yourself on completion, assess your strengths and weaknesses, and identify a new set of process goals for your summer training.

See how each of these five goals is a SMART goal?

• They are all specific enough so that you know exactly what to do to achieve those goals. (I’ve included mileage and selected a specific training program, but obviously you can choose your own.)

• They are measurable : you drive miles or note the number of programmed workouts. On the day of the time trial and race, you either come or you don’t. And you get an end time for each one to more accurately measure your progress.

• They are achievable : you have complete control over whether you go out for a run, enter a race or not, etc. (Obviously, if you do not have complete control over this due to life circumstances, you would write a different set of goals, taking these circumstances into account.)

• They are relevant : All of them will help you become a faster 5K runner.

• They are time-limited : Using this structure, you can sit down and schedule each run on your calendar for the next three or four months. (You have to work backwards from the competition date to find the start of the training program and so on.)

These goals define your process, and then you can re-evaluate it. After the Big Local 5K, do you want to do more specific 5K training to get faster? Do you want to train for a marathon for the chance to build a base and because you like the idea of ​​a side quest? Or you may find that your other life goals conflict with this goal – perhaps you’d rather cut back on your mileage this summer to surf more, and get back to running in the fall?

This way, you can still dream big, but you know you’re always on track to achieve those big goals—at least as long as you want them to. Aim for the moon, and if you don’t, at least you’ll build a damn good rocket ship along the way.

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