There is the saying, that if you don’t know where you want to go, any road will take you there. When it comes down to physique and/or performance, most probably your clients/athletes know the direction they want to go: Normally they want to improve, whatever that means for them. Your job as trainer is to help your athletes/clients on their journey of self-improvement. Coaches know that it takes time, effort and consistency to “get there”. How can we ensure, that we help our clients/athletes the best way possible?
1.) Define a Goal
Having a goal, you want to reach, gives you something worth sacrificing time and effort to as a coach or athlete. Defining your goal is the first step of reaching it. It does not depend if you are a performance oriented guy and your goal is to run faster or jump higher, you want to lose weight, or you are an athlete who just wants to get over the season without injuries. What is important, is to have something to work for. The foundation is to set smart goals… SMART is the keyword here: Every letter defines a characteristic that your goal should have in the best case:
S(pecific): Your goals must be as clear as possible: What do you want to reach and what resources you need? Who else is involved to reach the goal? Try not to be foggy on what you want to achieve: the better defined your goal is, the easier it is to find out how to get there
M(easurable): With measurable goals you can track your progress and set a “finish line”. To find out where you start, you might need to assess your current state and then decide where to go from there.
A(chieveable): Very important step: your goal must be realistic to achieve. Having unrealistic goals won’t help to transform motivation to dedication because you eventually will give up if it seems impossible to reach. If you can feel that your goal is within reach, and you are “close” you will be more motivated to achieve it. Accomplishment feels great! Make sure that reaching the goal is mostly in your own hands and not depending on “luck”.
R(elevant): Your goal must be of importance for your life. Why do you want to reach the goal? What will be better when you have succeeded? A relevant goal is set within the bigger picture and will help you on the way because it reminds you why you set the goal in the first place
T(ime-bound): Last but not least, your goal should have a Deadline: It help you to focus and also defines a timeframe you will dedicate to reach that goal. Once the deadline is set, you can procrastinate less because you will have some self-set pressure, you cannot start tomorrow, you must start now to get there!
Some of the characteristics are interconnected and not always 100% applicable but they give you a good framework to set a “good” goal. An example of SMART goalsetting could be: A Young basketball player wants to increase the odds of scoring: So he wants to add 5cm to his vertical jump by adding two training sessions per week in the weight room until the competitive season starts. It is realistic, has a deadline and measurable.
2.) Assessing
Assessing comes up while setting a goal: If you want to go somewhere, it’s necessary to know where you are right now. Assessment can be basic and involve few elements: For example, if someone wants to lose weight a basic assessment is stepping on the scale and get your starting point, and preferably also %bodyfat. It helps to set a realistic goal in a defined time.
The assessment is important because you want to have your goal measurable, and the evaluation gives you data you can look at later. Assessing the current state of a client or athlete can be as basic as the example with the weight, or way more detailed. With technology available today there exist so many possibilities that sometimes you don’t know where to start. Like when you are setting a goal your assessing should be specific to the goal or the sport: As a weightlifter you don’t care to much about the VO2max from a performance point of view, whereas as a cross-country skier it’s an important performance indicator. There are a lot of standardized testing protocols where you can compare your client/athlete to a large population, literature values or even elite athletes of their respective sport.
Even if you might think that assessing involves expensive technology, not all tests need fancy equipment. You can get a lot of relevant data with a stopwatch, a measurement tape or a video camera. The Results might not be as precise as with a high-tech solution but still of great interest (and better than nothing at all). Especially for small Sport Clubs or Personal Trainers, who don’t have much money to invest, the simple solutions are a good alternative. For example, if you want to know how high your athletes jump when preseason starts there are different possibilities you can assess that: You can either stick a measure tape to the wall, put some chalk on the fingertips, and let the athletes try to touch the wall as high as possible or, on the other end of the tech-scale, perform force plate measurement. One is easy to perform and cheap but not so precise, the other is exact, gives a lot of data but is expensive and needs more knowledge to perform.
Depending on where you work, what equipment you have available and who you are working with, your assessment may differ.
I personally think that a proper assessment is very important. At the same time with more technology available, we run risk to over-assess clients just because we can. Try to find out what you really need to get to your goal and focus your energy on that.
3.) Planning and Realization
Once you know where you are at, and where you want to go it’s the time to find out how to get there. I believe that there are several paths you can take, to bring your athlete or client from Point A (being the starting point) to Point B (being the defined goal). Coaches and clients have different philosophies, backgrounds, resources etc. what makes every situation unique. Basing on your knowledge and experience you will have to decide what is the best possible way to get from A to B and how to break down the process. It’s in your responsibility to expand your knowledge and experience to find better ways to help your clients. Also, it’s helpful to involve the clients in the process of planning, so you get additional information you can use for planning. At the same time with involving him/her in the process will give them ownership over their results. If THEY achieve THEIR goals, they stay motivated. Even though you might have planned most the process and pushed the goals in the right direction in the end the clients/athletes need to “do it”
4.) Adjusting and Checking/Reassessing
Now you have the goals set, the journey planned now you can lean back and enjoy the process, right? Wrong, now that thing called “life” happens: Things you decided, assessed and planed at Moment X may not be valid at Moment Y anymore. If you are working with athletes and interacting with sports coaches, things may even change on a daily basis depending for example of who played on the weekend and who was on the bench. You might have to adapt the initial plan to the actual circumstances of exhaustion, injuries etc. Even without thinking about the daily changing factors, you have to periodically reassess where you are at. Depending on what you find out, you can decide if you are moving to the right point, you have to change something in the planning or you even have to change the goals. Don’t feel bad if you and the athlete must change something on the plan or on the goals. At the moment you planned, you could not predict the future. Of course, that does not mean you should not plan, because things can change, its exactly the opposite: It means more that you should plan good so that you lose sight of the goals you have but be flexible. Keep in mind that things are dynamic and interconnected.
The R of SMART meaning “Relevant” already reveals that there is more than short-term goals (as outlined in the example of the basketball player). Mostly we deal with really long-term goals in the reality of athletic development. You may have an athlete that wants to win an Olympic Medal in 6 years. Even if the process of setting goals is not different in its essence, it shows the importance of Adjusting and Reassessing and the importance of proper planning. With a good planning you can break down a long-term goal into different short-term goals than an athlete can achieve and bring them step to step to the point where they ultimately want to be.
To sum it up, this is why we have different types of Cycles in Strength and Conditioning: E.g. Macro- and Micro-cycles. Where you want to be in 5 years defines where you have to be end of year, that defines what you have to do every month and that defines what you have to do tomorrow to get there…
