Start With One Simple Questions: What Are You Trying to Achieve?
One key thing for any client when setting a goal is to ask the question of ‘What am I trying to achieve?’. From experience, there are multiple answers people have given when asked this question.
- To get stronger
- Increase muscle mass
- Losing body fat/ lose weight
- Improve a specific lift
- Improve mobility or movement
- Simply to become fitter and more capable of daily demands
This list makes it obvious that there is no right or wrong answer when it comes to a reason to strength train. As long as you have a reason to start strength training, that’s good enough for us.
Why Do Strength Training Goals Matter?
Setting goals ultimately gives you direction, somewhere to aim and focus on throughout your training. This in turn may increase your motivation and give you more purpose when training. This sets out your future plan and allows you to set short and long term goals. Imagine your goal is to deadlift 100KG. If you are currently lifting 60KG, 100KG may be a long way away. Breaking that goal into smaller milestones such as 65KG, 70KG, 75KG and so on, gives you achievable targets along the way.
Each milestone provides an opportunity to recognise progress and maintain momentum. Whilst still having the 100KG deadlift goal in mind. This can be something as simple as working towards adding 2.5KG when appropriate.
Goals also do not have to be number based. They can be anything that may increase someone’s motivation such as ‘Improve my technique’, ‘Achieve a chin-up’, ‘Increase my confidence in the gym’, ‘Train consistently three times per week’, to name a few.
What Does the Research Say?
Setting a clear goal doesn’t make you stronger by itself, but it can give your training direction. Research suggests that setting specific goals can increase physical activity and may also have a positive effect on psychological factors such as motivation and self-efficacy. By providing something measurable to work towards, goals can also give you a clear way to monitor our progress and may help support consistency with training. (1, 2, 3).
Goals Should Evolve With You
Goals also should evolve, reviewing, adapting and progressing them accordingly can keep motivation high. When you achieve a goal, the next question should then be, ‘Now what?’ This is when it is a good time to review how the last goal went. Were there things that you could have done better? Are there areas you could improve? And could these lessons influence your next goal? Goals can also change completely, it doesn’t simply have to be to increase the weight. It may be to work toward your first powerlifting competition or even to then add in an extra day of training to your routine.
To Conclude
You don’t need to know exactly where you’ll be in 5 years.You just need to know what you’re working on next and how you can achieve that in as little or big steps as possible.
Reference List
- Lin TY, Liao CJ, Chang C, Hung TM. Effect of goal-setting, attentional focus, and feedback on resistance training: Stage 1 registered report of a factorial randomized controlled trial. Psychology of Sport and Exercise [Internet]. 2025 Oct 15 [cited 2026 Oct 12];103006. Available from: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1469029225002055
- Knittle K, Nurmi J, Crutzen R, Hankonen N, Beattie M, Dombrowski SU. How can interventions increase motivation for physical activity? A systematic review and meta-analysis. Health Psychology Review. 2018 Feb 15;12(3):211–30.
- Garstang KR, Jackman PC, Healy LC, Cooper SB, Magistro D. What effect do goal setting interventions have on physical activity and psychological outcomes in insufficiently active adults? A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Physical Activity and Health [Internet]. 2024 June 1 [cited 2026 Oct 12];21(6):541–53. Available from: https://journals.humankinetics.com/view/journals/jpah/21/6/article-p541.xml
