Determine Your Goals and Needs

You have read all about how specific training yields specific results and about how to set your personal goals in chapter 4. Hopefully by now you have established some long- and short-term goals for your strength training. If not, now is the time to do it. Start with your long-term goals and make them objective. Put some numbers in so that you can quantify your success. The numbers can run the gamut from goals for body weight, to pant size, to the amount of weight lifted, to cholesterol level.

Also, make sure to add an end date to your goal. If it is open-ended, you can never reach it. The longer away your end date is, the more short-term goals you need to reach it. Planning a short-term goal that lasts four weeks provides an excellent reevaluation point. Four weeks is not so far away that if you find you are headed in the wrong direction, you can't correct things without much harm being done. And it's not too short a time period to see changes in your body. Be realistic when coordinating your end date and your goals. If your long-term goal is to win a powerlifting competition and you are a newcomer to strength training, then your end date may be years from now. You will need a lot of short-term goals to keep you on track and motivated.

Once you've set your goals, you have to determine how you will achieve them. Are you going to follow a program to increase strength, increase power, or lose fat (or do you want it all)? Scrutinize your goals and use the knowledge you've gained from the previous chapters to match your goals up with training methods. For example, if your long-term goals include gaining strength and losing fat, then consider a strength-training program mixed in with metabolic weight-training circuits (see chapter 3). If your long-term goal is to improve your bone density score, then you'll design a bone-building program (provided at the end of this chapter).