When you’re an athlete, having goals is important. It doesn’t matter whether you are a professional athlete or just like to exercise for an hour a few days per week. Setting goals for yourself can be a huge part of being successful with your training. Whether those goals involve lifting a certain amount of weight, running a certain distance in a specified amount of time, or beating your previous personal best in something, setting goals helps you stay motivated. You constantly have something to work towards, and being proud of yourself for achieving a goal is a pretty amazing feeling.
For years, I worked out without having any specific goals – not that there’s anything wrong with that, either. It’s fun to work out just for the sake of working out because you enjoy it and it keeps you healthy. But now that I’ve been Crossfitting regularly for almost a year now and I truly do care about seeing my numbers go up, I wanted to start writing down some specific goals so I have something to help keep me accountable!
It’s also a good time of the year to think about goals, since we’re halfway through June, which means we’re just about halfway through the year. So I came up with a few things that I want to improve or get into the habit of doing regularly for the last half of 2016. I could come up with a ton of different things I want to accomplish with my training between now and the end of the year, since, well, I still kind of suck at everything. But this list includes the things I want to focus on the most.
- Master double unders. The highest number of unbroken double unders I’ve ever gotten is a grand total of (drum roll please)…one. Yup, you read that right. One. I have trouble getting the rhythm down and can’t string them together. Coordination is hard, okay? To be fair, I hardly ever practice these outside of the gym, and if they aren’t programmed into our WODs, several weeks could go by where I’m not doing these at all. I’m going to try dedicating 15-20 minutes once or twice a week to working on these at home.
- Get a bodyweight back squat. This may be a lofty goal, as my 1 rep max back squat is still about 40 pounds under my current weight. I’m not sure if I still have any newbie gainz left in me, but being able to finally squat my bodyweight would just be amazing.
- Get a strict pullup. I would love to be able to do an unassisted pullup. I still have to use one green band and one blue band whenever we do pullups, and I usually do ring rows if a WOD has 10 or more pullups since otherwise it will just slow me down way too much. I’m hoping that a combination of me losing a few more pounds plus strengthening my upper back and shoulders and arms will help me get my very first pullup by the end of the year.
- Get my clean and jerk above 100 pounds. We haven’t tested our 1 rep maxes for the clean and jerk in months, but my 1 rep max clean was 90 pounds at the end of 2015 and my split jerk was 85 pounds about 2-3 months ago. One of the coaches has been working with me a lot on my form lately, so I’m hoping that the corrections to my technique will soon help me get over the 100-pound mark!
- Incorporate more yoga and/or mobility exercises into my routine. This is something I definitely don’t do enough of. Every once in a while, I’ll do some random yoga routine that I find on YouTube at night before I go to bed. It isn’t something I enjoy very much though, so it’s never become a habit. However, I know that it’s good for you, and I know that having good mobility will help with my weightlifting, so I’m going to aim for doing yoga or mobility routines at least twice a week.
Photo credit: Set Goals And Stick To It! | Flickr – Photo Sharing!Keith Davenport Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
