Step 8: I Set Goals

I have been writing about some steps I took to get from overweight and in pain to a powerlifter. Today I will cover Step 8: I set goals. So let’s start with a goal. I want to be Wonder Woman by next week. That’s a good goal, right? Yeah, no. But I have to tell you, I follow some groups, and I feel some people set some very unrealistic, unattainable super short term goals which will ultimately lead to failure. I hear things like “I need to loose 30 pounds in 3 weeks for a cruise I am going on”. Well, that person should have started thinking about that last year.

When I say set goals, they need to be realistic. If you have a goal to eat an entire elephant, you can’t look at the entire elephant and think you can consume it in one giant bite. You have to set a goal to eat only so many bites a day. If you want eat the entire elephant in a year, how many bites a day would you need to eat. Now I hope your goal is not to eat an elephant, and I really hope you are not calculating how many bites a day it would take to eat an elephant in a year,  but you get the point.

When I first started lifting weights, I had very realistic goals. When I first started squatting, all I wanted to do was squat. I had a very hard time squatting the bar at first. I had a goal to add 10 pounds to each side. My end of year goal was to have a 45 on each side, but first I wanted the 10 pounders. When I did the 10 pounders, I wanted the 25 pounders…then the 35 pounders, then the 45 pounders. But, as you see in the picture below, my squats sucked, even when I got to the 45s, I could only quarter squat. My hip mobility was terrible, but my workout partner knew that was all I could do because of my SI joint problems and hip problems, and even though I thought I was going low, I wasn’t, and he knew it, but he let me do what I could do.

It wasn’t until I first decided that I might want to powerlift that I had to look at my crappy squats and have a reality check. I had to make depth, and that meant lowering my weight and starting over on my squats. I had quarter squatted 225, but not nearly to depth. So I lowered my weight back down to 135 and started over. I could get parallel, but that wasn’t good enough. It took work, and it took small goals…adding 2.5 pounds, 5 pounds, and maybe 10 pounds. I must have started my squats over like 5 times, trying to adjust my stance to find something that worked for me. It took time, frustration, and hard work. But I wanted to compete, and I had to slowly improve my hip flexibility. And that took a lot of time. I am still working on perfecting my squats. I am only at 205. 225 is my year end goal.

Let’s talk about my favorite lift, deadlift. I have also slowly increased that weight. My recent deadlift PR was only 5 pounds over my last PR. My ultimate goal is to deadlift 405, but my goal for my meet at the end of April is 330, MAYBE 335. I can do 325 right now. Strengthening the muscle is good, but you must also strengthen ligaments and tendons, and in my opinion, that means moving up slower.

Let’s talk about bench…oh the dreaded bench. I make the smallest gains in bench. I could only bench the bar when I started, and it was exciting when I added 10 pounders. When I FINALLY added 45 pounders (135 total) I was ecstatic. Now 135 is my workout weight. I am working on consistently being able to push 155. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can’t. Last time I pushed it twice! That was exciting! My end of year goal is 175. My April meet goal? I can’t even answer that one because bench is that lift that drives me nuts. I just hope to beat my last meet lift of 137.

Becoming a powerlifter has given me something to set goals for, and I love having something to work towards. Otherwise, I would just be going in the gym and lifting some things. It also helps me to keep my diet clean when I have goals. I ain’t going to eat junk food when I consider how it will set me back in my training. I also am not going to miss a training day when I have goals to reach. The feeling of stepping on the platform and setting some records keeps me focused on the goals I set.

Setting goals is important. But don’t set a huge goal expecting to accomplish it in a short time. You will likely fail, and then you will quit because of the disappointment. If you are trying to loose weight, remember it took time to gain the weight, it takes time to loose it. If you are building muscle, it takes time to build muscle, unless you are the Hulk, then you just need to get angry…LOL. BUT, do set large goals, just be realistic about the little goals it takes to get to the big one. And don’t be surprised if your goals lead you down a different path. You may shoot for the moon and miss, but you will end up among the stars. You may start off wanting to loose weight, then find yourself trying to gain muscle weight. So eat your elephant one bite at a time, while drifting among the stars, or something like that.  Happy goal setting!