Attitudes, norms and behavioral intentions, and your long-term goals may be changing behavior and improving health status. Behavior change can be an intermediate or long-term goal, depending on the circumstances and how behavior is defined. Remind yourself that social marketing seeks behavior. SMART goals are meant to address all of your major job responsibilities. Remember, goals are intended to focus attention and resources on what is most important so that you can be successful in achieving your priorities. SMART Goals are goals for your day-to-day job. SMART Goal Examples S=Specific, M=Measurable, A=Appropriate, R=Realistic & Rigorous, T=Timebound These are sample goals and by no means perfect. The intent is to show that all SMART components need to be included in the goal statement. Special thank you to Melissa Harder, Anna Marie Gosser and Trinity Welch-Radabaugh for their assistance with.

How to Achieve Long Term Fitness Goals

Do you want to achieve long term fitness goals that you can maintain and sustain? Of course you do! Maintaining and sustaining your long term health goals is the ‘secret sauce’ when it comes to holistic health and wellness.

Read on to find out why you need to be SMARTER when it comes to achieving your long term exercise goals.

Page Contents

• Examples of long term SMART fitness goals | Long term goal examples

The SMART acronym is widely known in the context of goal setting. This is why I recommend that all your goals should be created with at least SMART principles in mind. Not just your long term goals for working out.

But for the purpose of this blog, I’m going to stick to examples of long term fitness goals. And explain why SMARTER long term workout goals are better than SMART goals.

Do any of the following apply to you on the following long term fitness goals list?

• Maybe you want to lose weight or achieve your goal body?
• Do you have a cardiovascular long term goal such as climbing a mountain or entering a biking or running event?
• Are your fitness and wellness goals based on general wellbeing factors such as having better energy levels and strengthening your immune system?
• Perhaps your goals for exercise are simply around wanting to create better exercise adherence or improving your overall strength and fitness?

Long term and short term goals for a healthy lifestyle will vary from person to person. Start by thinking about what is important to you and why.

(This post includes affiliate links for which I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you should you make a purchase)

How well have you done at setting your fit goals in the past?

Perhaps you’ve tried setting smart fitness goals in the past but they’ve always felt a bit ‘wishy-washy’ or too vague?

Or maybe they’ve been too far-fetched? Meaning your subconscious mind doesn’t believe you can really achieve the results you desire. So you never take any actions to achieve your short term and long term fitness goals. (Or any other goals for that matter!). Meaning you continue to be frustrated and/or unhappy about your list of long term health goals.

The trick to setting fitness goals is to get really clear on the desired results you want to achieve.

But maybe you’re thinking “I have no idea what my long term fitness goals should be” or “How do you set goals in life when you have no idea where to even start?”. If at this point you have no idea of what your health and fitness goal should be, take the FREE 12-question quiz to discover which area of your life you should focus on. Plus, receive goal suggestions just for you with your results. Otherwise, read on to get smarter about your goals.

Time to get SMARTER with your long term goals for fitness

Learning to apply the SMARTER goal-setting principle will help you gain clarity around what you want to achieve. As well as help you both achieve your desired results AND sustain them!

So here it is. The definition of what it takes to set SMARTER goals followed by some long term SMART goals examples (fitness-specific). Remember you can use the FREE download to create or modify your own.

The classic SMART principle to set your long term physical goals and long term health goals:

• S – Specific. Goals need to be clear
• M – Measurable. You need to know exactly what will determine the long term goal for fitness and health has been reached
• A – Achievable. Take a look at what’s going on in your life. What sacrifices will need to be made and what support you will need? Is the long term smart goal realistic?
• R – Relevant. Make sure it’s something that interests you (rather than being something someone else wants you to do) and is in line with where you want to go
• T – Timebound. Put a time frame on your smart goal for fitness and work back from there to figure out what will need to happen in between

From SMART goals to SMARTER goals

It’s quite simple to move from SMART goal setting to SMARTER goal setting. All we need to do is make your goals EXCITING and REWARDING. So in addition to the above SMART goal setting points, simply add:

• E – Exciting/Enjoyable. Why do you REALLY want this fitness SMART goal? Are your reasons motivating enough to make you take action?
• R – Rewarding! How will you celebrate achieving your long term SMART goals? Are the rewards enjoyable enough for you to stick to the actions you need to take to achieve the goal?

Personally, I like this adapted model for setting your long term goals for health. If your goal both excites you AND rewards you, you’ll be way more pumped to achieve it.

This way you’re going to be far more likely to take the required actions to help you achieve your long term fitness goals.

(Remember the SMARTER goal-setting principle can be used for any kind of short, medium and long term fitness goals AND in other areas of your life such as career, financial or relationship).

Are you ready to follow through on your health and fitness goals? Achieving your goals is only 20% setting them, but 80% slaying. What are your barriers when it comes to implementing your fitness program or fitness plan? You need to understand the challenges that people experience when trying to achieve personal fitness goals. The free Slay Your Goals 10 step guide can help you take the next steps towards achieving your goals. Here’s your FREE Printable 10-Step Guide to Slaying Your Goals.

Examples of long term SMART fitness goals | Long term goal examples

What is an example of a long term fitness goal? What are the most common fitness goals? And what are examples of long term health and fitness goals? Let’s take a few different vague long term goals examples and turn them into SMARTER goals.

“I want to lose weight”

This is an ok start for a long term fitness goal example. However it could contain a lot more information to give it more clarity and substance. You need to turn it into your own personal fitness smart goal. Examples like “I want to lose weight” could possibly be shared by a million other people. Let’s take it a step further and make it more specific by explaining where on your body you most want to lose weight from.

“I want to lose weight from my stomach and buttocks”

Good, it’s going to be easier to work towards your smart fitness goals with clarity like this. Let’s take the next step by also making it easily measurable. How will you be able to measure that you’ve lost weight from your stomach and buttocks?

“I want to lose weight from my stomach and buttocks so I can comfortably fit back into my old size 10 jeans”

Progress, not perfection!

Great work! Well done on getting this far. Now let’s make sure that ALL your long term health and fitness goals feel achievable to you.

This means you need to consider whether the disconnect between what you want and where you are now is too big.

Let me explain this a little further. In the context of long term health goals examples like the one above – how long is it since you’ve fitted those jeans? If you’ve never actually really fitted them, then maybe your smart goal examples for health are not realistic or achievable?

If you’ve gradually gained weight over the past year or so, then I would suspect your long term fitness goal probably is realistic. However, if you haven’t been able to fit your jeans for 20 years then your goal may or not be achievable in a safe manner.

Only you can sensibly determine if your long term fitness goals are achievable. Once you decide that they ultimately are, you’ll set a realistic time frame to achieve them.

Maybe you’ve set some great goals and you’re wondering “how do I reach my fitness goals?” if you really want to stop setting goals and start slaying them, sign up for the FREE goals slayer masterclass below. You’ll learn the 6 steps to slaying your goals that no one is telling you!

Before we look at time frames for your long term fitness goal examples, let’s check the relevance of your fitness smart goals examples. Start by checking that your long term fitness goals are things you really want to achieve. YOU need to have a strong desire to achieve them, and not be doing so because you think it’s something that SOMEONE ELSE wants for you.

Again, you don’t necessarily need to re-write your long term fitness goals at this point, just make sure that they are really important to you. If you want to look into this on a deeper level, check out my blog post about ‘knowing your why’.

By the way, if you prefer video, check out the Facebook Live video below. Here I outline the concepts of setting long as well as short and medium-term fitness goals using the SMARTER principle. I also share some lesser-known goal setting principles to make sure you’ve got this goal setting process nailed!

Now make your long term fitness goals examples TIME BOUND

Let’s go back to where we left off with this particular smart goals fitness example. Here it is:

“I want to lose weight from my stomach and buttocks so I can comfortably fit back into my old size 10 jeans”

Now we need to make it timebound. Long term fitness goals can vary in length from six months to one year, or even five years or more! Your own personal long term goal definition in terms of when you will achieve your goal should be based on where you are now. If it took you one year to gain the weight so that you didn’t fit your jeans properly, then this is probably a safe time frame to lose that same amount of weight again.

Yes, I’m sure you can lose it faster than that, but sustainable (long term) weight loss is best achieved slowly and surely. You can read more about this in my blog post “Sustainable fat loss: a reality check”.

At this stage, your health smart goals examples could read something like this:

“Over the course of one year I want to lose weight from my stomach and buttocks so I can comfortably fit back into my old size 10 jeans”

Make your SMART fitness goal examples SMARTER

You might not want to change your example of a smart goal for fitness any further. But to make sure that it passes the SMARTER test remember to add the magic of the ‘E’ and the ‘R’.

Do your goals EXCITE you and will you ENJOY working towards them? How will you REWARD yourself for achieving them?

Do you have weight loss goals? Examples like the one above could be made SMARTER by adding a little extra on:

“Over the course of one year I want to lose weight from my stomach and buttocks so I can comfortably fit back into my size 10 jeans and feel amazing. I will celebrate with a spa day each month that I maintain my results.”

Now this is an example of a SMARTER goal! It sounds more exciting because the person has specified how they will FEEL when they achieve their long term fitness goal. They’ve also set themselves a reward for achieving it.

If you’re starting to get the hang of this health and fitness goal setting process, make sure you grab my FREE goal setting template. Get those ideas down on paper while they’re fresh!

This is the first step to showing that you’re committed to your long term goals. The worksheet will also introduce you to the next important phase of PREPARATION for achieving your goal.

Other SMART goal fitness examples

In case you can’t relate to this long term fitness goal because you don’t need or want to lose weight, let’s have a look at a couple of additional sample SMARTER goals for health and fitness. First I’ll write a vague long term fitness goal, and underneath I’ll write the SMARTER version.

Vague effort for a physical activity centered goal: “I want to run”. SMARTER effort:

By the end of this year I will have completed my first 5 km fun run and be consistent with great fitness nutrition. I will feel so proud to be able to show my children that consistency and dedication pay off. The increased energy I will have will allow me to spend more quality time with my family, which is the best reward ever”

Vague effort: “I’d like to be stronger”. SMARTER effort:

By December 2020 I will be much stronger because I will be able to do five full push ups on my toes whilst maintaining good technique. This is exciting because I’ll find so many other activities easier as well. Overall I know I’ll simply feel more healthy and will be happy because I’m truly leading an active lifestyle. I will reward myself with a new outfit to show off my toned arms”

Now that we’ve had a look a few smart goals examples (fitness-specific) it’s time to put those long term fitness goals into action!

The next step towards achieving your long term fitness goals

Once you’ve written your long term fitness goals in a SMART format, break them down to medium-term goals (about three months) and then to four-week goals. From there you can create daily and weekly targets to keep you headed in the direction you want to go.

Do you feel a bit lost about how to actually achieve your long term fitness goals, or are you still trying to figure out what you really want to achieve? Maybe you’re even wondering “How do I plan long term goals without getting derailed?”.

Check out my holistic health online services page to start a conversation about 1:1 coaching for the ultimate support and direction to help you achieve your short, medium, and long term fitness goals. A personal trainer or online fitness coach like me can go a long way towards helping you create the plan and establish the habits required to kick your goals.

For more articles like this, check out my goal setting and motivation blog category. The next post you might want to check out covers worry and self-doubt, personal accountability, inspired action, and more! For New Year health and fitness goal setting tips, check out these ideas to get your New Year off to the best start.

P.S. What are some fitness goals you would like to achieve? Do you have any specific long term goals? Write your personal fitness goals examples in the box below – I’d love to read them!

Disclaimer: This article contains affiliate links. This means that if you make a purchase after clicking on one of these recommended service provider links, like an insurance broker, or a travel agent, I may earn a commission – at no extra cost to you. [For my full disclosure, please see my DISCLAIMER page).

Writing SMART Goals for Employees (With Examples)

A colleague once told me “I have a really important goal in life…I want to climb Mt. Everest, someday.”

While he was absolutely serious in his demeanor and spoke at length about why he wanted to do it, the short conversation revealed he had never done any climbing before. Further, he had hardly done research into what it actually took to climb the world’s tallest peak. And while I was intrigued by his personal ambition, his lack of research and even a basic plan indicated to me that he was not really on a path to achieving his goal.

Setting goals – whether they be for mountain climbing, your retirement plans, or for your employees – is a valuable exercise for any endeavor. Performance goals establish targets to measure both progress and success. Additionally, they also align priorities and drive focus on a central set of objectives.

Unfortunately, when setting goals for their organizations, many managers make the same mistake my colleague made as he spoke at length about climbing Everest. When goals are poorly defined, unreasonable and lack a strategy for achievement, we set our employees (and our teams) up to fail.

To improve how we set goals for our teams, we’re going to dig into the SMART goal-setting method, as well as provide some good examples of SMART goals for employees.

Why Set Performance Goals for Employees?

Whether or not your organization has a formal performance management system, it’s always a good idea to set goals for your staff each year. Employee goal setting has three distinct advantages.

First, by establishing goals for employees, you are defining expectations for output. For example, if you set a goal for your employee to generate one market intelligence report every month, your employee knows that at the end of the year he or she will be on the hook for twelve reports.

Second, setting employee goals drives focus. When done correctly, the employee’s goals should align his or her work to the broader business strategy and initiatives.

If your company wants to grow sales by 10%, for example, your sales team members should have goals that tie directly to that 10% of growth in some manner (such as, growing sales in each of their territories by 10%). If you set goals that have no connection to the business objectives, your employee will struggle to see how his or her efforts support the organization’s mission.

This worksheet serves as a template for writing SMART goals for employees, and includes examples. A simple framework and series of questions will help managers and employees develop goals that are specific, measureable, achievable, realistic and timed.

Free MRH Download: SMART Goal Development Worksheet

This MRH worksheet serves as a template for writing SMART goals for you and your employees. A simple framework and series of easy questions will help managers and employees develop goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timed.
You can find all of our free templates on our TOOLS AND TEMPLATES PAGE.

Third, setting performance measures that challenge the employee gives him or her a chance to learn and develop their skills during the process. Be creative when assigning individual objectives for each employee, and tie goals to their specific developmental needs, where possible.

It is worth noting that performance goals are not simply about meeting metrics or driving employees to work hard. Rather, you should also include goals that go beyond an employee’s day-to-day activities and that will drive the overall enhancement to your organization.

Writing performance goals that include things like developing a new process, reducing product cost, or filling some gap that exists in your firm pushes the employee beyond just doing their job and asks that they contribute to the strategic needs of the organization.

In short, performance goals should drive employee behavior, challenge your staff personally, and ultimately help the business improve.

Employee Performance Goals Should:

1. Set expectations for the upcoming year.
2. Tie employee’s activity to the overall business goals and vision.
3. Drive behavior and activity.
4. Challenge the employee as a means of developing skills.
5. Drive towards an enhanced state of the business.

The S.M.A.R.T. Framework for Goal Setting

Now that we’ve explained their importance, how do I write employee performance goals that drive behavior? The answer is easier than you might think.

The best way to write good goals for employees is to make them S.M.A.R.T.: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-Based. The S.M.A.R.T. goal concept is used widely by businesses and organizations to define performance targets for individuals as well as the organization as a whole.

Unlike “climbing Mt. Everest someday,” by using the S.M.A.R.T. concept you will ensure the goals you set for employees are detailed and reasonable. Additionally, this framework for setting employee goals makes it easier to clearly identify whether or not a goal was achieved at the end of the year.

To illustrate how this model works, let’s explore each component of S.M.A.R.T. a little further.

Specific

When setting goals for your staff, you must first be specific in what you want them to achieve. Ensure that the targets you set are clear and easily understood.

If your goals are vague and extremely broad, not only will your employee struggle to perform them, but you will have a hard time assessing the employee’s success when it comes to writing your performance evaluation at the end of the year.

Here is an example of a performance goal for a property manager, that illustrates the difference between a specific and non-specific goal:

• Non-Specific: “Ensure property is secure.”
• Specific: “Verify that all unoccupied properties are locked and secured once per month. Confirm all public gates and entry points are functioning properly once per week.”

Here is another performance goal example for a product developer or engineer:

• Non-Specific: “Improve product performance.”
• Specific: “Enhance the Enviro-Lite bulb design by year end, in order to increase product life by 1000 hours.”

When goals are specific and detailed, it drives accountability and clearly establishes what the employee needs to achieve without the ambiguity.

Measurable

The most common mistake we make as managers when setting employee goals is defining targets that we cannot measure. Further, it’s not just that the goals are vague or non-specific, but we sometimes choose targets we can’t even quantify.

Writing good performance goals should signal to the employee what they need to do. Properly written goals should also make it easy for a manager to say if the employee did or did not achieve their objective.

A common example of a goal we might see reads like this: “Support the Sales team.” How do you measure support? How can you clearly say the employee did or did not support the Sales team? Was their support enough?

You can improve goals by including performance targets that can be measured in a straightforward way. This means that goals should be quantitative and descriptive in nature.

Here is an example of a S.M.A.R.T. goal for a business development representative, illustrating the difference between being measurable and not:

• Non-measurable: “Develop new business proposals.”
• Measurable: “Pursue, write and submit 5 new business proposals to customers by the end of the year.”

Goals can also be written to describe a degree of progress that is to be achieved. Here is an example of a performance goal for a project manager that illustrates this idea:

• Non-measurable: “Meet project milestones.”
• Measurable: “Complete all phase two Aurora project milestones by August. Complete 50% of phase three Aurora project milestones by year end.”

The best way to write measurable performance goals is to think numbers.

Attainable

The goals you set for your employees must be achievable, at least within the context you set around the goal. It doesn’t mean the goals should be easy – by contrast, effective goals should stretch the employee and challenge them.

Still, performance goals should not be impossible for the employee to satisfy, either based on the targets set or by the nature of the goal itself.

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For example, your human resources employees should not have goals to develop new software products. It’s not what HR does. Further, writing attainable employee performance goals should result in measures that are feasible and practical.

For an HR generalist, the following examples compare the difference between an attainable and unattainable measure:

• Unattainable: “Complete all new on boarding procedures for new hires within 24 hours of their start date.”
• Attainable: “Complete all new on-boarding procedure for new hires within 30 days of their start date.”

In short, writing employee goals that are attainable means the measures should be achievable under normal circumstances and given the necessary resources.

Realistic

When setting goals for employees, make sure the targets you establish are realistic. By realistic, it means your goal should reflect something that is practical, when compared to historical achievements.

For example, your Sales team should not have a goal to double sales in the first quarter if you’ve never had more than a 5% growth in a single quarter before.

Further, to make goals realistic, they should consider things like resources, financials, available skill set and other objectives.

Returning to my colleague who dreamed of being a mountain climber, in order to reach to the top of Mount Everest – while a lofty challenge – he would need years of training and tremendous financial backing to achieve his goal. Until he actually began to take steps in this direction, his goal was not very feasible.

Time-Based

The last piece of the S.M.A.R.T. goal writing framework has to do with the timeframe for completion.

Another one of the most common mistakes we make when setting goals for employees is not specifying a time by which they need to achieve the goal (“climbing Everest…someday”).

To make your goals S.M.A.R.T., they need to have a timeframe established. The timeframe can be a specific date, a time of year, a quarter, a month, etc. Timing can also be quantified in terms of a frequency for recurring activities (e.g. daily, weekly, monthly).

To illustrate this, consider the following example of a performance goal for a healthcare worker:

• Not Time-Based: “Attend professional development training.”
• Time-Based: “Attend at least one health-related professional development seminar per quarter, or 4 by year-end.”

For a manufacturing supervisor, time-based goals may be something like this:

• Not Time-Based: “Conduct process audits.”
• Time-Based: “Conduct at least two process audits per week. At least 75% of processes must be reviewed by the end of each quarter.”

Including both the time-phasing of various pieces of goals as well as defining and end date helps outline steps and sequences by which the goal is to be achieved.

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• A web-based platform that is easy to use for me and my employees.
  
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Examples of SMART Goals for Employees

Now that we’ve explored the details of the framework, here is a list of examples of SMART goals for employees. In the examples below, we illustrate the difference between poorly written goals and SMART goals that are specific and measurable at the end of the performance cycle.

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Writing Performance Goals for Employees

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Performance goals are an essential management vehicle for driving focus and setting expectations among employees. By using the S.M.A.R.T framework, managers can establish clear objectives that make it easy to measure performance at the end of the year.

What Is Dialectical Behavioral Therapy

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