Setting Goals, Making a Plan, and Tracking Progress

Elisa Ma
Sep 15, 2025
7 min read

Updated: Oct 7, 2025

“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!” – Benjamin Franklin. Setting up a reliable system is key to consistent training and progress.

How to Set Goals

Having clear goals can help you focus and stay motivated. A common method of setting goals is the SMART goal framework, which George T. Doran originally coined in 1981 as a business and management strategy. It is now used in many disciplines, particularly athletics.

Adapted for general use, the SMART Goal Framework states that all goals should be:

Specific – Clearly define what you want to accomplish.
Measurable – Ensure there’s a way to track progress.
Achievable – Set a goal that is realistic given resources and time.
Relevant – Align the goal with broader objectives or values.
Time-bound – Set a deadline to create urgency and focus.

Importantly, one should record baseline data, such as measurements and feelings, when setting goals, which aligns greatly with the measurable and achievable parts of goal setting.

Another known method to achieve one’s goals is by setting up systems and habits. In his bestseller novel, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones, author James Clear emphasizes that habits should be:

Obvious – Make habits easy to notice and remember (e.g., set cues or reminders).
Attractive – Link habits to something you enjoy to increase motivation.
Easy – Start with small, manageable actions to reduce the friction of tackling larger, more complicated tasks.
Satisfying – Ensure habits provide an immediate sense of reward to reinforce them.

By setting clear goals, creating systems, and designing your surroundings to make desired habits rewarding, consistent training becomes a lot easier.

Making a Training Plan

After establishing goals, creating a realistic plan can ensure consistent progress and increase the likelihood of success. Different types of athletes will have different goals and training plans. Many runners will have weekly mileage goals, and many lifters will have weekly training splits to push as hard as possible each workout, such as push-pull-legs or upper-lower body. Regardless of the specific workouts, it is important to either create or integrate training time into your existing schedule.

Many sports are seasonal, so training should be adaptable to that. Off-season training might focus on building strength and endurance, while in-season training may emphasize skill refinement and maintenance.

If you know important races or tryouts are coming up, a keen sense of urgency will be motivating. However, keeping a constant drive can be artificially created. One method is the 12-Week Year, a concept introduced by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington in their book The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months. Instead of thinking in terms of the calendar year, think in multi-week cycles with weekly execution plans and incremental assessments. This method encourages setting specific and time-bound goals, tracking progress consistently, and making necessary adjustments based on performance data. By condensing the timeframe, individuals create a sense of urgency that drives focus and accountability, leading to improved results in a shorter period.

Tracking Progress to Stay Consistent

While knowing your baseline data is key to setting effective goals, being able to visualize and quantify progress can be incredibly motivating. Many athletes will use habit tracking, nutrition tracking, and journaling, but an easily implementable way to visualize improvement is through graphing metrics.

A popular app among runners is Strava, a social-media-like take on running and cycling. Users log and share workouts with other users, but Strava also automatically tracks speed and distance. After an extended period of use, Strava will alert you of new personal records and graph your progress.

Some athletes may also enjoy fitness wearables like the Apple Watch, Garmin, or the Fitbit to collect even more data from their workouts. While some may view tracking all metrics as distracting, others swear by data collection and interpretation to gauge progress.

Lifting and Recovery

Building Muscle

Many people, especially women, will forgo training in muscular strength and endurance in favor of cardiovascular and flexibility training. Without disregarding running and pilates, building and maintaining muscle is vital to bone health, injury prevention, and overall well-being. Young individuals may not fear much now, but building healthy habits can prevent them from joining the 45% of older individuals with Sarcopenia, a condition characterized by the loss of muscle, greatly debilitating our abilities to perform daily functions.

Muscle growth occurs when muscle fibers (called myocytes) experience stress or resistance, leading to microscopic tears. These tears trigger a repair process in which the body rebuilds the muscle fibers stronger and larger. Progressive overload, proper nutrition, and sufficient recovery time are essential for optimizing muscle growth.

Muscle fibers are generalized as fast and slow twitch, though more nuance has been discovered. Fast-twitch muscle fibers are primarily used for anaerobic explosive movements, while slow-twitch muscle fibers are used for aerobic endurance movements. Genetics do play a role in the proportion of these fiber types, but generally, you should train the movements you want to do more of. That means more sprints and plyometrics if you want to run faster, and longer distance pieces if you want to run longer.

Here are methods to maximize muscle growth, aka hypertrophy, during your workouts:

Slowing down and controlling the eccentric, the lowering of the weight, has been shown to increase muscle mass. Slowing down the movement prevents using momentum, extending the time under tension that your muscles endure.
Exact numbers are debated, but doing 3–6 sets of 6–12 repetitions at 60–80% of one-rep max (1RM) appears to be the optimal weight and repetitions to build muscle. These ranges allow for controlled form while also placing enough stress.
Rest between sets should range from 30 to 60 seconds for building muscle. If lifting for strength or if you feel especially fatigued, increase the rest time until you can safely perform another set.
Whichever muscle group you work out first will experience the most gain from that session.
Cluster sets: Doing fewer reps per set with shorter rest can help with increasing weight.
Agonist-Antagonist Supersets: Targeting different muscle groups right after each other in a circuit can help save time.
Drop sets: Going down in weight in an exercise can help you nearly approach failure more safely.
Progressive overload: Increase workout weight/volume/difficulty between 2.5 and 10% every week. The exact progress should vary with the muscle group/lift.

Getting Started on Lifting

Going to the gym for the first time can be intimidating, especially when you see people more experienced than you and when there is an injury risk. The best advice is to start with light weights and to have a spotter when you perform unfamiliar or heavier lifts.

Using free weights (ie, dumbbell, barbell, kettlebell) is also better for training stabilizing muscles. The “big three” compound lifts are the bench press, the barbell back squat, and the deadlift. With proper form, progression in these three lifts can be incredibly rewarding.

Using machines has a lower margin of error and is easier for targeting specific muscle groups. Most machines will have a diagram for the intended movement, but always ensure the machine is stationary and properly functioning before use.

Getting Started on Calisthenics

When going to the gym is not possible, calisthenics, or bodyweight exercises, can be used to earn great gains. For progression, calisthenics are typically done at high repetitions, adding resistance, and/ or increasing the difficulty with new variations.

A simple full-body calisthenics workout can consist of pull-ups, push-ups, tricep dips, squats, lunges, calf raises, planks, Russian twists, and crunches. Having a strong body, and not just select strong muscles, is important to athletic performance and overall health.

Optimize Recovery

The foundation for recovering from a workout is dynamically warming up, statically cooling down, proper drinking, eating, and hydration. After those pillars are fulfilled, additional measures can be taken, such as

Consuming protein pre- & post-workout.
Consuming carbs post-workout to replenish glycogen reserves
Consuming electrolytes if working in heat/high intensity for over an hour
Massages. Many professional athletes will get massages, but foam rolling and massage guns are an easy way to feel less sore.
Compression equipment
Cryotherapy. Cold exposure can help you feel more awake and recovered
Avoid alcohol and tobacco
Light workout → 24 hours to recover that muscle group
Heavier workout → 2-3+ days to recover that muscle groups

Tapering

For a few days or weeks leading up to an important race, many athletes will “taper”, or reduce their training. By cutting back on volume/mileage but maintaining intensity, athletes see improvements of about 3%. Generally, the longer the race, the longer the taper, and more information can be found on Runner's World.

The Mind Game

When You Plateau

When you no longer feel as if you are progressing, or feel as if your skills are declining, it is easy to feel discouraged and feel as if previous efforts were for nothing.

Plateaus occur due to your body getting used to the loads and movements you are demanding it to push through. Other lifestyle factors like rest and nutrition can impact progress, but plateauing often can be addressed by changing your routine.

Ways to get out of a plateau:

Changing the intensity and duration of your workouts. This can mean trying a new warm-up or adding extra reps at a lower weight.
Adding new workouts and types of movement. Cross-conditioning can mean using a new machine, taking a class, or taking on a new sport.
Track your progressive overloading to determine if you are actually pushing as hard as you safely can.
Seek a professional or an experienced friend’s guidance to determine if your form is a limiting factor.

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/workout-plateau#bottom-line

Also, remember that numbers should not make you want to quit an activity. Even if you do not see the numbers changing, making time for an activity is a great reward in itself.

Intensive Focus

After developing physical fitness and technical skills, having strong concentration and intention becomes the filter for the best athletes.

Here are a few strategies to build up concentration for a game/event:

Pre-performance routines: listening to music, a specific warm-up, body scanning, meditation, positive self-talk, etc. AJ Brown of the Philadelphia Eagles, the Super Bowl LIX champions, has recently gained attention for his pre-game ritual of reading the book INNER EXCELLENCE: Train Your Mind for Extraordinary Performance and the Best Possible Life by Jim Murphy.
Building mental toughness with preparation and training in game-like settings.
Focusing on only what is happening in front of you.
Have incremental markers like being aware of each mile of a longer race of time left in the game. Focus on getting through that small increment first.
Visualization strategies to cultivate technique off the field. Intensely visualizing the best performance, like doing a specific lift, so competition day provides the trigger to access already built neural networks.
Activate the “Quiet Eye”. Hold your gaze longer on your target (ie, basketball hoop, sprint finish line) before executing the movement.