Top Five Long-Term Fitness Goals

Setting fitness goals really seems to have one of two outcomes: success that you can build new goals upon, or failure that sidelines your motivation. At the beginning of each new year, we usually find ourselves reevaluating our workout routines and looking for smart goals that might help with getting healthier.

There are numerous ways we go about improving our health, and some are more beneficial than others. In general, we have both short-term and long-term goals. We’ll talk about the differences between each, and reasons you may have been unsuccessful in achieving them in the past.

We’ll also give you five long-term fitness goals to try to increase your total wellness and feel better as you age.

Why We Fail

We can’t discuss fitness goals without discussing failure. If you’ve ever set a goal and missed the mark, you know the kind of debilitating lack of motivation that comes along with it. You feel defeated and usually, resign yourself to giving up.

Failing to meet a set goal doesn’t usually happen because you’re incapable of meeting the goal, but rather because the goal wasn’t set properly. Let’s look at the most common ways this happens.

The Goal Isn’t Sustainable

Sustainability is important with goal setting.

For instance, if you set a goal to exercise two hours per day, but also work eight-hour shifts in between moving children to and from extracurriculars, it will be virtually impossible to make it to the gym for a two-hour workout – that schedule just can’t work in the long run.

Likewise, fad diets and diets that eliminate entire food groups are hardly sustainable for most people, and rarely yield the expected results at the end of the year.

Financial Cost Makes the Goal Less Attainable

Fitness goals must fit within your lifestyle and your budget. You may love the idea of having a personal trainer, but your budget may dictate that taking up running and working with free weights at home is more cost-effective. Everyone’s fitness journey looks different, and there’s always a way to meet your exercise goals while maintaining financial flexibility.

There are numerous ways to get fit, and many of them do not require a single cent. Walking, running, swimming, and using free weights or equipment at home are low to no cost, and can still give you great results.

Discipline vs. Motivation

There’s a common misconception about people who are able to meet their fitness goals — it’s thought that these people were simply born with a level of motivation and intensity that is superior to others.

In reality, they don’t necessarily have motivation, but they usually have discipline.

Discipline is doing something because you know it needs to be done, regardless of whether or not you feel like doing it. Focusing on being disciplined instead of motivated is a better way of achieving your specific fitness goals.

There Are Missing Pieces of the Puzzle

Sometimes our fitness goals leave gaps that don’t allow us to be successful. If we focus solely on nutrition and avoid physical exercise, we set ourselves up for failure because we need both activity and a balanced diet.

Likewise, if we focus on only lowering our blood sugar level or our cholesterol, other pillars of our health may fail because we haven’t attended to them. We have to take a total-package approach to our healthcare to get the results we want and that our bodies need.

Short-Term Goals vs. Long-Term Goals

There are two different types of fitness goals we make: short-term and long-term. Defining each can help you create a realistic time frame that helps you meet each type of goal you set.

Short Term Goals

Short-term fitness goals are easily reached in short periods of time. These mini-goals may be reachable by the end of a day, a week, or a month. Short-term goals may be getting enough water each day, improving your 5k pace, or making sure you don’t skip breakfast.

Short-term goals provide faster gratification and serve as building blocks for long-term goals. They can give you a boost of confidence to reach long-term goals because they are usually easier to achieve, and they build upon your current fitness level.

Long-Term Goals

Long-term fitness goals are goals we set that take longer than a month to accomplish. These could include improving your blood sugar levels, losing more than 20 pounds, changing your body composition by building your muscles, sticking to a high-intensity interval training (HIIT) workout plan, cutting out junk food, or building up your endurance enough to run a half marathon.

We struggle with long-term goals because they require discipline and delayed gratification. Once motivation wears off, we must rely on discipline to accomplish the goal, and we may not see the results of these goals for months.

Five Long-Term Fitness Goals Worth Trying

If you set sustainable, cost-effective, attainable goals, you might just find that you can accomplish more than you ever thought possible.

Here are five long-term fitness goals you can set and meet this year.

1. Eat a More Balanced Diet

Your diet influences all aspects of your health. The vitamins and minerals in your food nourish your body to carry out every function required for your survival.

Eating a balanced diet isn’t about cutting calories or fat loss. A balanced diet is one that consists of the important nutrients your body needs, and not a lot of what it doesn’t. You can eat a balanced diet by making sure you focus on lean meats, fruits, and vegetables, whole grains, and unprocessed items, and if you choose to have a cookie with your lunch once in a while, that’s a-okay.

2. Have Healthier Vitals

If you can’t remember when you had your last blood draw, make it one of your new year’s resolutions to get a blood panel done this year. Important information like your cholesterol levels, average blood sugar levels, and average liver lipids can be gathered from a simple, routine blood draw.

Improving your vitals is a long-term goal that will pay dividends to your health. Focusing on lowering your blood pressure if it is high, maintaining healthy cholesterol numbers, and lowering your resting heart rate are all ways to improve your health and help you keep age-related illnesses at bay.

3. Make Exercise a Regular Part of Your Routine

If you find you have difficulty sticking to a particular exercise program, pick something else. For instance, if you hate running, try pull-ups or a few reps of other bodyweight exercises. There are numerous other ways to get cardiovascular exercise that will suit you better and be more sustainable for you.

If you start a program and don’t like it, give yourself permission to stop and restart a new program. Incidentally, being flexible is essential in getting yourself into a routine.

4. Make Better Lifestyle Choices

Your lifestyle choices play a major role in your overall wellness. Smoking, drinking alcohol in excess, and using illicit drugs are not only dangerous behaviors, but they can slowly chip away at your good health, doing long-term damage in a little amount of time. Making lifestyle changes can significantly increase your overall wellness and help you hit your goals within your desired time frame.

5. Take a Better Supplement

Supplements can help fill in dietary gaps and make up for missing nutrients. Supplements help support your body and give you an extra boost. However, it’s worth noting that some supplements are more valuable to your body than others.

Focusing on your total health, it’s important to understand that the basis of your wellness begins in your cells. Your cells make up the tissues and organs that make up the systems in your body.

Taking care of your cellular health, then, can lead to increased total health.

One supplement that is scientifically proven to support your cells is C15:0.^*

Why C15:0?

C15:0, aka pentadecanoic acid, is an essential fatty acid found in whole-fat dairy products, a few plants, and some fish. While researching ways to improve the health and welfare of older dolphins, a veterinary epidemiologist noted that higher levels of this micronutrient were associated with better health and a lower risk of age-related illnesses.

Three years and eight studies later, she found that C15:0 was not only associated with better health, but the cause of better health. C15:0 has since been proposed as an essential fatty acid, the first to be discovered in over 90 years. This research was published in Nature's Scientific Reports in 2020.

Fatty15 is the first and only C15:0 supplement, which is available in a small, once-daily capsule. The single ingredient in fatty15 is 99% pure, vegan-friendly, bioavailable, stable, and sustainable, without the cows or calories.

Fatty15 helps your cells in three key ways:^*

1. Repairs mitochondria. The mitochondria in our cells are responsible for supplying our body as a whole with the energy it needs to carry out day-to-day activities. With age, the mitochondria get worn down and less efficient. Fatty15 repairs and rejuvenates mitochondria to help power your body and give you your energy back.
   1. Improves cellular resilience. Just as mitochondria get worn down, so do our cell membranes. After so many years of wear and tear, cell membranes can become weak and more vulnerable to damage. Fatty15 is a sturdy fatty acid that integrates itself into cell membranes, fortifying them and keeping them strong so your cells are protected.
      1. Supports homeostasis. By activating special receptors in our bodies called PPARs that control mood, immunity, appetite, and sleep, fatty15 helps bring the body back into balance. That can mean deeper sleep, calmer mood, healthier skin, improved metabolism, and much, much more.

Fatty15 helps support your cells in a way that gives them a fighting chance to thrive as they age.^*

Fatty15: Long Term Results

Taking a supplement is an easy way to set a long-term goal you can actually achieve. Fatty15 is a once daily essential fatty acid supplement that helps you meet your goals by supporting your health at the cellular level.

This year, make the decision to meet your long-term fitness goals and health goals alike. Healthy habits like eating better, exercising, and taking fatty15 are easy ways to feel young again from the inside out and stay healthier for longer.

Get started with fatty15 today and see how easy your goals can be to reach with science-backed cellular support on your side.

Sources:

Diabetes|MayoClinic.org

Cholesterol Information | cdc.gov

Understanding Blood Pressure Readings | American Heart Association

Reviewed by Eric Venn-Watson, MD, MBA.