Goal Setting

Mark Brown

September 2, 2021

Goal setting has always been hard for me to wrap my head around because I have rarely met something prior to strength training worth having a hard standard to hit. Even after I started lifting, setting specific goals was difficult for me. Lifting for general health is so aimless. Effective training can definitely done without specific goals in mind if the process is done well and understood because it’s a grinder’s sport. I did make progress doing so but that feeling of accomplishment was nonexistent. That feeling I think is responsible for lack of motivation sometimes and the root cause why so many stop. Strength training over the last two years has taught me the value of goal setting and how best to understand and set those goals: How best to keep general goals from becoming meaningless, how best to make specific goals, and how to make short term goals line up with long term goals. It’s not as simple as writing down a goal and executing it. 

I am an aimless soul at my core. I need to find something that really generates interest to motivate me to really dive into the rabbit hole. Anything short of that and I’m kind of out. I am not interested in being a jack of all trades. Not even lifting really even brought me that motivation. A lot of that was that the “goal” of getting better and stronger barely qualifies as a stated goal. It’s so general that’s there nothing inherently there. The fact that just going and doing anything with a modicum of challenge to it in the beginning will result in getting better and stronger just exacerbates that generality. Goal setting isn’t something I did naturally growing up so even when I did do it, like the case with lifting my senior year of high school trying to get on the baseball field more, I never stuck to the concept of goal setting after that. 

It’s taken me all the way to 2021 to really take goal setting seriously. The major difference between now and past years is that I am now seeing more tangible evidence of success than I have before and a better understanding of the process that got me there. Part of that process was putting aside a lot of the bodybuilding stuff I was going before and doing more powerlifting. I get a more feeling out of powerlifting than I do bodybuilding. That has nothing to do with what’s required to do with the latter because both are very much a grind in their own way. As stated above, I’ve always had an understood goal of getting stronger but I think of the truth this way: General goals get general results. This is not an indictment of general goals. They do need to exist. The mistake is believing that a general goal will get the same effect that a more specific one will. Programming specific goals into a training cycle is ideal but choices have to be made on what will be prioritized based on time and the fact the human body only can handle so much. It wasn’t a surprise to me that my squat didn’t show signs of the progress at the top end my bench press and deadlift did during my summer 2021 powerbuilding program. I had prioritized deadlifting over squatting. It also wasn’t a surprise to me that the best progress I saw in my legs was in the work sets where I was doing more reps than at the heavier loads. In the end, what I was after was stronger legs and I got that. 

General goals are necessary to set in the beginning because there is no baseline knowledge to inform on what a realistic specific goal should be. I remember saying I wanted to bench press 250 pounds when I first joined Aspen Athletic Clubs in 2013 when talking with a trainer in my first meeting there. Looking back on it now, that statement really meant nothing. I had no idea how to actually get there and had no idea where I was at. It just sounded like a cool number at the time. I didn’t set any real goals from about 2013-18 because I was still in what I would call an “organic build” phase. I went to the gym and figured out what worked best together for me without any major pointed outside direction. Those 5 years featured a lot of supplemental lifts as mains and tons of accessories. I saw plenty of progress in those lifts in that time but they are examples of what I was referring to in the introduction about being able to get strength gains by just grinding workouts. Towards the end of summer in 2018 I changed my program radically to be 100% upper body to help it catch up to my legs and back. It marks a clear delineation in my strength training journey from semi serious to outright serious. 

My chest, shoulders and arms were lagging severely behind my legs and back muscular and strength development. It marked the first time I truly set a specific goal for myself lifting. That transformed what lifting meant to me. I had more emotional investment in it. It was becoming more who I was and what defined me. My bench press in the middle of 2018 was a struggling 185 pounds. I used more dumbbells for heavy main lifts because I liked them better for safety reasons. I remember I was pressing the 75-85 pound dumbbells for flat pressing as I saw progress up to the 95-100 pound dumbbells over the next few months into 2019. That was about the time I made it a specific goal to be able to press the125 pound dumbbells on the rack. Those were the heaviest in the gym. This was the first real specific goal I made for myself. Accessories all had to benefit the dumbbell press, either flat or overhead. In 2021, I learned from videos from Youtube that this progressive kind of overload training is very much in the powerlifting vain of training. In fact, I was employing a lot of tactics in the gym I didn’t know had already been defined. By the end of 2019 I had hit my goal and started using the 125s for low rep sets, not just heavy singles. There was a definite feeling of accomplishment in achieving this goal that was very different from  anything I had done before. It was the kind of success that made me want more. The sense of accomplishment is why making specific goals will always produce more concrete results than setting general goals. The latter produces a grind that can wear down even the toughest willpowers. It is primarily why I just don’t get as much enjoyment out of bodybuilding as I do powerlifting. Both have strong points and one really helps feed the other but I know I just have to push through the grind of bodybuilding to help my deadlift, squat, bench press and overhead press. 

The element that makes specific goals superior to general goals for experienced lifters is the understanding that goes into what it means to achieve that specific goal. General improvements will come along when training for specificity. Strength goals will also spur muscular development in cases of goals that involve increased 1 rep max efforts. The former will definitely get the lion’s share but it’s not like muscular development won’t happen. Setting a goal in a main lift requires more than just doing that lift a lot. Technique is important as it is really the only way one learns how to do something but strength is required to actually perform the lift. That’s where supplemental and accessory work comes in. Some powerlifters just train the lift and that’s fine but that doesn’t work for me, at least for right now. If I make a goal weight to hit doing bench press chest, arms, lats, and shoulders are all involved in the development of it. Each of those muscle groups matter and must be trained on their own to prevent them from being the weak link. The body only has so many lifts in it for a given session so those supplemental and accessory lifts must be chosen carefully. That goes for all compound movements. Setting those specific goals will also keep a lifter on task more and help them from drifting mentally into areas of strength training that will not ultimately benefit it. It is very easy to get distracted from a program, especially if taking in a lot fitness media, but being rooted in a dedicated specific plan will greatly reduce the chances of that. Skill acquisition, as Dave Tate calls it, is extremely important so learning new lifts is must. During a specifically planned program is not the time to do that. 

One more other important component in this discussion is how goal setting effects a lifter psychologically. Failure can be very helpful or very damaging. It takes a long time to really understand failure as a training tool. For experienced lifters and coaches, failure is used to understand exactly where one stands. Plans can be made around those failures to push through the sticking points that caused them. For new lifters, experiencing failure, or a lack of progress, in the beginning can represent a major blow to their psyche. If they lack willpower naturally, it will compromise their emotional investment. Setting general goals is a necessary defense against this potentially playing out over the first year or two. Having a hard specific goal in place during this time could break a new lifter mentally and cause them give up entirely if failure to accomplish a major goal were to occur. It is very tempting to want to make hard, specific statements about goals in the beginning but I think it is a major mistake. The slow nature of progress at the gym is very unforgiving. I made a grand statement of what I wanted but it was ultimately the organic nature of my first 5 years of lifting discoveries that helped me hone in on what actually made me feel some accomplishment.

The accomplishment of a given goal is measured by two related factors: Expectations and time. The latter is the most important of the two because it influences all of the choices made in planning and execution of said plan. For professional or amateur bodybuilders, powerlifters, and/or strongmen time is represented by the number of weeks till a given show. For the the vast majority of people who strength train, there’s nowhere to show progress made outside of the various social media platforms that exist in 2021 as ways to earn income. A shorter timetable means a plan is going to be more aggressive its structure and is going to compromise more safety measures and other areas to successfully hit the expected goal on time. Long term timetables allow for progress to come along more steadily and more organically. Safety is something that is never far from my mind when I lift because injuries can happen at anytime, good form or not, and I can’t train if I am hurt. Long term timetables allow more safety protocols to be in place and less compromised than they would be if time were shorter. 

Expectations is what can really mess with a lifter’s head. Strength training is quite linear but doesn’t always add up the way one expects all the time. Training with the progressive overload principle leads to gains but being able to bench press 225 pounds 8-10 times like I can doesn’t necessary add up to a really high 1 rep max, which in my case is 285 pounds. Expecting explosive jumps in weight lifted during max effort lifts after becoming experienced is dangerous for both physical and mental health. Failing attempts at personal best lifts can be emotionally and psychologically devastating. Most of my personal best lifts come during regular training sessions when I am feeling good about expanding my weight range. Surviving fails max weight attempts is a major test for a lifter. In May, I attempted a 405 pound deadlift at the end of the deadlift portion of my workout and failed to get it past my knee. Since I started doin that lift again in Summer of 2020, my deadlift had been climbing steadily to 385 without failure. The previous sets felt good and I thought that day could be the day. It wasn’t the case. I knew the lift would be harder than anything other I had done, but I expected to get it. My gym willpower and psyche is near bulletproof at this point so I took it in stride and responded by making a program built around successfully pulling 405 pounds. Learning that failure is part of the process helped manage expectations so that when it does occur it isn’t damaging psychologically.

Decisions have consequences. As such, new circumstances and situations are developing with every new decision made. This makes lining up one’s short term goals with their long term goals very difficult. Often times decisions made to ensure the success of the short term goal will negatively effect the long term goal. Depending on the timetable of the latter, the damage might not be mitigable. My decision in 2018 to work on upper body exclusively with dumbbells is an example of a decision made that took 2 years to realize its effect then start the process of changing. After adding bench press back to my routine during the pandemic lifting with Pete, my training partner, I realized the effect of only using dumbbells as my heavy main chest exercise. My hand placement on the bar was how I instinctively pressed dumbbells. This meant my bench press grip was quite narrow. That brought it in more tricep into the lift and has took till Summer 2021 to make my grip more suited for maximum pressing power. This situation was mitigable because a total lack of a timeline. However, if there had been a goal with bench press in mind during the stretch from May 2020 to May 2021, then the decision to use only dumbbells would have resulted in a negative effect overall. If I want to make serious gains in weight I can deadlift or squat in the next two years, then everything in my life will be effected by that short term goal decision. Part of me legitimately wonders how long I can keep up doing my physically demanding job while lifting the way I do, even if my training makes my job easier and feel better. The place tends to break people.

Goals are not blowhard mission statements made to motivate people to do what words say. They are not distant dreams written down in a journal, blog or whatever. They need to be well thought out and attainable with a realistic amount of effort in a well defined amount of time. When one goal is accomplished, make a new one and keep that process going over and over. Decisions made to attain a goal in the present may well have negative consequences years down the road after the short term goal has been accomplished. Those consequences just have to be lived with, understood why they occurred and a new plan made to deal with them.