Health and wellness is in a much different space than it was even 5 years ago.
People are investing more time, money and thought into their goals which is wonderful to see.
What it has created however is people becoming quite self-righteous about what a 'good' goal is and what a 'bad' goal is.
It's now not okay to say you want to exercise to lose weight in some corners...
How stupid is that?
Anyway, here are a couple of frames I would consider.
-Goal setting changes at different parts of the year.
The reality is an aesthetic goal (building muscle, losing fat etc) will ALWAYS work better before a beach holiday as a motivating tool, obviously not as many of us are using this throughout the winter as a motivator.
Maybe then we set a gym based goal like managing our first pull-up, lifting your bodyweight on a deadlift or a cardio based target.
For a lot of us we will cycle through aesthetic (how we look), performance (targets in gym) and lifestyle (exercising for mental health or to climb a munro) throughout the year.
At the end of the day these goals can also help each other, pull-ups get easier if you lose weight (if only I was tech savvy enough to insert a clever meme here).
-Push and Pull goals.
There are two types of goals.
We can be 'pulling' away from something. Think things like preventing illness, not wanting to hurt our back or being scared of how we will look at an event.
Or we can be 'pushing' toward something. Think striving to manage your first fitness competition, training to fit into an outfit or pushing for a PB.
Neither are right or wrong and indeed both will be applicable at different stages of your journey.
Having a mix of both tends to be nice for a lot of people, for example I am trying to pull away from a few niggly injuries I've had and pushing toward a double Hyrox next month.
-Deposits in your physical pension pot.
Healthspan is the ultimate goal of health and fitness. We aren't just trying to live longer, we're trying to live BETTER.
This means that even on the days where you don't feel it you can think of these small actions having a big impact down the line.
A quote I heard recently that really hit this home for me was 'anything above nothing compounds'. Basically no matter how small the action you take to being a healthier and fitter you it compounds over time.
-It's okay to stay the same!
The reality is that if you have a training history in the gym this time of year may not result in much progress (if you are new to the gym we can usually make progress pretty quick).
Demoralising huh?
Yeah but not as demoralising as stopping for 10 weeks and starting at square one on January 1st.
If we can maintain over the festive period it means we don't start from scratch when we are ready to push it and have maintained a strong base.