Why you need a performance based goal.

Are your goals focused on only weight loss? Losing x kgs, fitting into a certain size of clothes, getting a flat stomach or thinner thighs? Here’s why you need a performance goal too.

This kind of weight loss goal is good in that it is specific and measurable, however it is focused only on aesthetics. With an aesthetic goal it is easy to continue to shift the goal posts, or not notice when you have achieved your goal. Body dysmorphia is where you can’t see your body for what it is, and what you see in the mirror is a distortion of your minds making. Instead of seeing and acknowledging all the progress you’ve made, your muscle tone and fat you’ve lost, you focus on the little bit that is still there. You don’t allow yourself to celebrate your progress, because you’re too focused on how far you have to go until you reach your “ideal” body.

Mirror Mirror.

With aesthetic goals, it is too easy to compare yourself to others. Aesthetic goals are from a value of beauty. And when it comes to beauty, it is too easy to pick on yourself. Comparing yourself to a photoshopped magazine shot of a fitness model in peak leanness is not the best way to develop a healthy body-image.

Let’s get real.

As women we need to have a minimum level of body fat in order to keep our hormones balanced for reproduction. Our normal, healthy baseline body fat level is much higher than for men. With the prevalence of bikini and fitness models gracing the covers of magazines and all over Facebook and Instagram, it is easy to think that that is what a woman should look like. What you need to remember is that bikini & fitness models train and diet themselves to peak leanness for competitions and shoots and don’t maintain that level of leanness all year round.

Improve your body image with a performance goal.

A performance goal on the other hand, is specific, positively focused, concrete and relates to how your body works and the things you can do. It is more aligned with the value of HEALTH, or fitness rather than BEAUTY. Setting yourself the goal of being able to run a certain distance, complete a fun-run or marathon, or even simply being able to do a difficult exercise, like chin ups, or simply touching your toes is a goal that you can’t distort. Either you can make the distance or you can’t, do the chin ups or not. You can’t move the goal posts. It is also much easier to see what you need to do to be able to achieve your performance based goal. If it’s running, you need to run. If it’s flexibility, you need to stretch. The steps along the way are pretty obvious. It’s not so difficult and overwhelming to get started when you set yourself a performance goal that is a stretch, but not crazy.

And the added Bonus.

Of course, the added bonus when you set yourself a fitness related performance goal is that your fitness will improve and you will likely lose some weight along the way, you are also less likely to be stressed out along the way, and more easily celebrate and focus on your achievements as you get closer and closer to reaching your performance based goal. So set yourself a performance goal, get cracking on achieving it and cheer yourself along as you go after it!