Fitness goals
Long-term goals
I’ll turn 39 this year, and as I approach my 40’s I’ve been getting more introspective. One of the things I’ve found myself thinking about is about my approach to fitness, and what I’m looking to achieve with the training I do.
I’ve never really just focused on a single sport, but when I was younger my fitness goals involved being able to do specific things - run X distance in Y time, lift Z weight, pull off a certain move in Capoeira, and so on. Now I find myself thinking more about general fitness, and for longer-term goals. I mainly want to enjoy myself, fight stress, stay healthy, and avoid injuries. Barring major accident or illness, my health now will have a significant impact on my health in my old age. A friend likened training for long-term health goals to investing in a pension, and I really like that metaphor. I’m sure I will still set myself some short-term goals and challenges, but the focus has shifted somewhat.
At the same, COVID and the related lockdowns have limited my options for exercise. I haven’t been climbing, and my gym has been going through periods of closure or restricted opening hours. As a result, for most of the spring, summer, and autumn I was running more regularly than I ever have. I’ve been making much more use of kettlebells at home. Perhaps because my activities have been limited by external factors, I’ve been more mindful of the effects the different types of training have had.
A goal-based process
So, my goals seem to have changed and I’m wanting to reevaluate my approach a little. How to go about that? A while ago I ran across this article on Runner’s World which outlines a goal-based approach that I’m going to loosely follow. It’s a process which feels familiar to me as it has strong parallels to the way I approach continual approvement at work. The approach boils down to:
- Identify areas of focus - attributes you care about, and lifestyle factors which can have a big impact.
- Rate yourself in each of those areas.
- Rate the importance of each of the areas.
- Focus on 2 or 3 areas where the importance is high but your self-rating is low.
- Reassess and refocus every few months.
This selection of goals and the ratings are highly subjective, but I don’t see that as a problem. I spent an hour or so idenfifying some areas of focus and rating them, and dropped the numbers into a spreadsheet. There’s some overlap between some of the areas - e.g. work capacity is related to strength endurance and cardio endurance, but I think most of the value is in having taken the time to think about it, and consciously choosing 2 or 3 areas to focus on.
Choosing a focus and setting short-term goals
I spent a bit of time thinking about this and putting together a simple spreadsheet. Here’s what I came up with:
The areas with the biggest deficit for me right now are sleep and work capacity.
Sleep is pretty straightforward. It is obviously a hugely important factor in recovery, and general energy levels, but it’s also a big driver for overall health in both the short and long term. I don’t do any sort of sleep tracking, I just know that I’m probably not getting enough, and I have periods where the sleep quality is poor. The obvious thing to do here is to start tracking my sleep and see if I can improve some of the numbers. I’ll keep it simple, and just track number of hours, quality, and my general energy levels that day.
“Work capacity” concerns being able to output a high (but not maximal) amount of effort for a prolonged period. It is influenced by a combination of lactate threshold, cardio endurance, strength endurance, mental toughness, etc. I did quite a lot of steady state cardio last year which was great for my endurance, but when I have tried to run a fast 5k I’ve found I tend to burn out about 3-4k in. Again, keeping it simple I can set a goal to do a couple of sessions each week which focus on training this attribute. This means things like threshold runs, hill sprints, circuit training, and interval sessions. Though I don’t want to just focus on running, I can use my 5k time as a simple way to track this.
This all feels like a useful exercise. It feels good to have put some thought into this and set some short-term goals that fit into my long-term plan. Now I just need to put the effort in over the next couple of months, and see what progress I can make.