SMART goals make intuitive sense but are not a good fit for everyone, says one researcher.miodrag ignjatovic/Getty Images
So, how are those New Year’s fitness resolutions going?
Sorry, cheap shot. We all know that resolutions are easy to make but hard to keep. Surveys find that Quitter’s Day, the point at which most people have abandoned their yearly goals, typically falls some time in January or February. Part of the problem, according to a new report in the journal Sports Medicine, may be that we’re setting goals in a way that sets us up for failure.
One of the most popular approaches to goal-setting, in the fitness world and beyond, is to focus on SMART goals: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. First proposed by a management consultant named George Doran in 1981, this approach is widely prescribed as a way of making New Year’s resolutions and other fitness goals stick.
SMART goals make intuitive sense. Aiming to do, say, 20 push-ups and run five kilometres without stopping by the end of the year feels much more concrete than making a vague vow to get stronger and fitter. It’s easy to track your progress and plot your trajectory. For some people, this approach is effective and motivating.
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But it’s not always a good fit, according to a team led by psychology researcher Christian Swann of Southern Cross University in Australia. He and his colleagues argue that setting effective goals should be a flexible and individualized process rather than a formula based on an acronym.
For example, Dr. Swann explained in an e-mail, there’s evidence that setting specific fitness goals can be effective for people who are already experienced exercisers, but can backfire for beginners. The latter group doesn’t have enough experience to pick realistic benchmarks, and doesn’t yet have the know-how to achieve them. As a result, setting specific but unattainable goals ends up demotivating them.
Instead, “open” goals – seeing how many steps you can accumulate in a day rather than aiming for 10,000 steps, for example – can be an effective alternative. For example, one study published in Psychology of Sport and Exercise found that sedentary participants walked farther when given an open goal to “see how far you can walk in six minutes” compared to an individualized SMART goal such as “see if you can walk 450 metres in six minutes.”
“We think open goals can be a good starting point for helping people to get more active because they can provide a quicker sense of progress initially,” Dr. Swann noted. These goals are also more flexible, and so less likely to be derailed if you have a busy schedule or competing demands on your time.
Even the seemingly uncontroversial advice to make your goals “achievable” isn’t necessarily ideal. For experienced exercisers, researchers have found that the best outcomes often result from setting truly challenging goals – even if you don’t end up achieving what you were initially aiming for.
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In a perfect world, we would replace SMART goals with a similarly catchy but more effective algorithm. But, Dr. Swann and his colleagues concede, goal-setting is too personal and context-specific a process to be captured in a one-size-fits-all slogan.
Instead, they recommend adopting different kinds of goals in different situations, and paying attention to how those goals make you feel and how well they work. If one kind of goal isn’t working for you, try a different approach. You can even switch horses midstream, Dr. Swann adds, for example by “seeing how the first half of a run goes before switching to a specific goal for the finishing time.”
The same advice applies, on a grander scale, to dealing with lapsed New Year’s resolutions. If the targets you set for yourself in January aren’t working – if it’s clear that they’re too easy or too hard, if the pressure of tracking your progress toward them has become demotivating, or if you’ve simply lost interest – then set new ones. You might say it’s the smart thing to do.
Alex Hutchinson is the author of The Explorer’s Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map.
