Dancing Queen Fitness and Goal-setting Success
Last Friday evening, one of my personal training clients showed the value of dedicated training–nailing a dance routine at a yearly review put on by the local Fred Astaire Dance Studios. I was very proud of her. The routine was both technically and physically challenging–well beyond many of the other dance students. The applause and cheers reflected her success.
One of the reasons that she was able to handle such a routine (other than her dancing talent) was because of her approach to her training outside the studio. This client regularly attends my wife’s (St. Petersburg YMCA) indoor cycling class to help build her cardiovascular fitness and leg endurance. But, more importantly, several months ago she came to me looking for a strength program to help make her strong and enduring enough to pull off a highly physical dance routine with numerous lifts and jumps and quick foot work–her goals were very specific.
Specifity within your goal-setting is often the key to successfully reaching your goals. Here are some other great ways to enhance your goal-setting successes:
1. Write Down Your Goals: Putting what you want to achieve down on paper is one of the best ways to reinforce your resolve. It also helps you clarify what you want to achieve. Once you’ve honed in on something specific, write it down and put it someplace (or some places) where you will see it every day.
2. Share Those Goals With Others:This is another way to increase your motivation and resolve. Communicating your goal can be an important way of letting the people in your life know to expect some reprioritization of your time. It also helps provide you with (hopefully) a support network of family and friends–people who can encourage you and help keep you on the path to accomplishment.
3. Set Achievable Goals:Most people set themselves up for failure by making their goals too general–“I want to lose weight” or “I want to get stronger.” The more specific the goal, the easier it is to measure, the easier it will be to reach. My client didn’t just tell me she wanted to “be a better dancer.” She explained the showcase routine and we determined what fitness components we wanted to highlight–controlled body motion strength as well as dynamic strength, core strength for plank-like lifts, and balance. While designing a workout plan, I created some specific benchmarks to aim for–like holding the long slosh pipe overhead on one foot on the balance pad for at least one minute and being able to do two lenghts of my yard while executing an Overhead Walking Lunge with the Slosh Pipe. One of my client’s non-dance related goals was to be able to do more “real” push-ups. One of her post-dance showcase goals is to be able to do a pull-up.
While I talk about setting goals in a fitness context, these basic goal-setting strategies can be applied to any aspect of your life in which you want to achieve great things.
If you are looking to improve any aspect of your life or fitness–to take everything and anything you do to the next level–I am available in person or online to help you define, create a detailed plan and reach those goals. Contact me at kipkayak@hotmail.com and we can arrange everything from personal training to goal-setting sessions.
Kip Koelsch Author 