Goal Setting
why do we set goals?
Goals are a significant way to evaluate progress, motivate yourself through low points and help create accountability between you and your coaches. It is not only important to have goals but also to be vocal about them, check in on progress and redefine them when needed. Goals are only as helpful as you make them, consistent interaction and interface with your goals helps you to reach them.
How to set good/ functional goals? Make sure that your goals have the elements below in order to be most effective
Time: Make sure that your goals include a very clear time scale. Goals are generally most effective when they are working on a medium time scale such as 1-3 months however longterm goals are also important.
Specificity: it is helpful to have goals that are very specific, something such as improve strength is incredible general and hard to actually evaluate while improve lock off strength and be able to hold a one arm lock of for 10s is much more clear and easy to evaluate progress towards.
Diversity of goals: There are many types of goals, having goals that focus on different aspects of your climbing/ competing not only allow you to see improvements in various ways but also give you the freedom to have various focuses in your training. It is important that athletes have mental, technical and strength related goals as part of each season.
Goal examples:
manage stress better in comps
get stronger arms
improve jumps
There is nothing wrong wtih the content of these goals but they lack some of the above characteristics.
Rewritten they could look something like this:
consistently use breathing and meditation tactics during mock rounds and comps to calm myself and manage my stress during important comps.
Focus my workouts on pulling exercises to improve my lock off and explosive arm strength. Increase weighted pull up weight to 35lbs for 4 reps.
Improve my abilty to commit to jumps on my first try. Always work on commitment and coordination in each warm up to bring consistency.
