Setting Up Weightlifting Goals
The Importance of Setting Up Strength Goals
As personal trainers, we often ask, “What are your short and long-term weightlifting goals?” This is because these goals serve as a marker that will help us track your progress and make any necessary adjustments along the way towards reaching your results.
Specifically strength: My client, Yun, for example, historically has dabbled in some weight training before, but nothing very serious. She didn’t have a clue what she was really doing at the gym, but she made it her goal to build some lean muscle in her upper body and to be able to do at least one pull up.
So I put her through a progressive weight training program. After four months of hard work and committing to training two days a week, she was able to achieve that one pull up. Check it out! (watch video). Along with that, she has gained a good amount of strength in many areas in her upper body, which allowed her to perform a full planche push-up.
It’s really exciting for me to witness my clients succeed at reaching their goals and is definitely one of many things that makes my job worthwhile.
Defining and Setting Your Weightlifting Goals
The main point is that setting the right weightlifting goals is crucial for not just helping you reach your desired results, but also giving you motivation and feedback as you progress. Right now, those goals may change over time. Either place your value on the ones that matter or you base your goals on vanity, right?
The ones that matter tend to be based on strength, practicality, injury prevention, and performance. Vanity goals tend to lean towards all appearance, getting that V-shaped back, building sculpted arms, or building that big booty. But is there anything wrong with vanity goals?
Absolutely not! But one thing they both have in common though is that they both take time, require a plan, hard work, mental discipline, and your commitment. At the end of it all, they both blend in with one another.
So if you’re doing it for aesthetic reasons, you’re going to build strength that will carry over to everyday life. If you’re doing it for performance goals, you’re naturally going to build sculpted arms, or build that bigger booty.
Your Goals Impact Your Mindset
Let me get back to one of those common points about goal setting, which is the mental discipline. Just like with everything else in this self-improvement world, the mindset matters, and it has the power to help you achieve amazing things in life. But specifically what we’re talking about is achieving your weightlifting goals.
So let’s say, your goal is to brace properly and have a strong back in order to reduce low back pain. After investing weeks or months of training, you’ll begin to notice how your back doesn’t flare up as frequently, your ability to pick up heavy items off the ground, or reaching up high on the shelf is much easier than before. That’s because the amount of time that you have invested on your specific goal has made it possible to avoid the agonizing and debilitating back pain that had plagued you for years by simply heightening your muscle awareness to engage your core correctly.
Now you can imagine how much of an impact this will have on your mindset and excite you set other fitness goals.
Ultimately, this is what goal-setting can do for you in regards to improving your strength and becoming stronger on your weightlifting journey. This is one tool that has really helped our clients either in person or in our online coaching group, the STRENGTH SOCIETY.
The Strength Society coaching group may be for you if you thrive working independently and/or are on a budget. We can provide structure in your workouts, accountability to nudge you forward, and educate you with quality, evidenced-based information on fitness and nutrition.
The Strength Society provides so much value because you’re receiving everything you would get from a one-on-one training session, it’s easy on your pockets, and you’ll have the support from a trainer in your corner to answer questions, get clarity on technical issues in your workouts and much more.
You’ll have a whole community of like-minded people with a common goal and provide you additional support.
If you’re curious to learn more about THE STRENGTH SOCIETY, click here!
