Setting Fitness Goals

If you are just starting a fitness or exercise program, you need to take a few preliminary steps to make certain you undertake a program that will work for you. Starting with goals will help you stick to a fitness regime over the coming months.

The first step is to assess your current health situation. While most people will benefit from an exercise program, picking the wrong program may do more harm than good. For example, if you have bad knees, then running might not work for you in the beginning stages, but swimming would be ideal. If you have health issues, then get your doctor’s recommendation and input in designing a program that will help improve your health (in fact, even healthy people should consult their doctor before starting an exercise program).

Another benefit of seeing your doctor before you start a program is that you will establish a measurement baseline with your current weight, blood pressure, heart rate and blood chemistry, which you can use to set goals. Most fitness programs will help you improve your blood pressure, reduce weight, and help lower LDL, the bad cholesterol, and raise the HDL (good cholesterol) in your blood, among the many positive changes. Knowing your start point will help motivate you when you see the positive changes that occur during the coming months or make program modifications if you don’t see changes.

Also, another important benchmark to record is your waist, hip, & chest measurements. Your body measurements are a quick guide to how well an exercise program is working. If you have followed Dr. Oz on Oprah you know he talks about waist sizes, over 40 inches for men and 35 inches for women, being a risk predictor for heart attacks and other health problems.

Once you know the baseline measurements you can determine your goals for your program. Are you overweight? Is your waist size too large? Do you have high blood pressure?

For example, you might want to lose 15 pounds and take 4 inches off your waist while lowering your blood pressure from 130/95 to 115/80. Now you have a fitness goal without a plan. Next time we will talk about taking the goals and coming up with the tactical plan to reach your goals.

I am an Independent Beachbody Coach. For additional information go to my webpage at www.teambeachbody.com/thx1138

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