A Well-Defined Goal

What it Takes to Actually Achieve Your New Year’s Resolution(s) 

     I rolled out of bed this morning, went to the coffee maker to brew my morning cup of Joe, and then put on the local morning news while I listened to the spewing and sputtering sounds made by my generic Keurig.  I don’t usually watch the news in the morning.  I typically get out of bed and, as my coffee is brewing, begin lacing up my shoes for a morning walk while my dog Kenji paces back and forth in anxious anticipation of our almost daily exercise.  But it was so cold this morning, and with slight snow flurries coming down, I thought it would be good to take the day off from my usual walk (much, it must be said, to my dog’s chagrin).  So I turned on the news to see what the weather had in store this week in my adopted home state of Alabama.

     But, don’t worry, it’s not the weather in the Deep South that I want to discuss for this essay.  No, it’s something quite different, but something relevant to this time of the year.

     While awaiting for the upcoming weather report, there was a story on how to achieve your New Year’s resolutions.  Now, it’s not what the pencil-necked geek—who looked as if he probably gets sand kicked in his face when he takes his girl to the beach; and if you don’t understand that reference, just Google “Charles Atlas”—on the news was saying about achieving those resolutions that I want to discuss here, not that there was anything necessarily wrong about what was said.  And, of course, not that there’s anything wrong with being a geek.  I happen to be one myself, just not a pencil-necked one.  No, what got me thinking about the very essay you’re now staring at was the image the local news was using for their journalistic endeavor at helping folks with their resolutions.  It was an image of the typical resolutions made by the majority of Americans.  And the top two were: “lose weight” and “eat healthy.”

     Now, if you’re reading my blog—even if you just happened to stumble upon it for your first time—your goals are probably not to “lose weight” or to “eat healthier,” but it very well could be that you have decided on some resolutions such as “get big” or “get shredded” or even “get big while also getting shredded” or “become the strongest M’Fer in the gym.”  But, of course, the problem with these sorts of resolutions is that, when you think about it, and as much as I’m fond of the last one, they aren’t really resolutions at all, are they?  They’re too vague.  “Getting big” might, indeed, be your goal, just as “eating healthier” might be the goal of a vast majority of the population this month.  But in order to achieve that goal you need a very specific resolution.

     Your resolution—your goal to help you achieve your (let’s call it) “ultimate” goal—must be very specific.  If the average American wants to start eating healthy, what does that even look like?  If “eating healthy” means eating more fruits and vegetables, then it would be better to have a very definite resolution of eating 2 servings of fruit and 2 servings of vegetables per day.  Once it’s measurable it becomes achievable.  You can’t measure simply “eating healthier.”  To be honest, I don’t even know what the average person thinks “eating healthy” entails.  Heck, the person who makes the resolution probably doesn’t know that, either, which makes it all the more important to have an unambiguous, well-defined resolution.

     If your goal is to become big and strong—probably the goal of quite a few readers—that’s a perfectly fine goal.  It was certainly the primary goal I had when I first gripped hand to barbell over 35 years ago.  But to achieve it, you need to look at a few different factors.  First, what does it take to get big from a training and eating standpoint?  Second, what does it take to get strong from both of those standpoints?  You need to ask yourself questions such as these even if that’s not the specific goal that you have.  Asking questions will help you to hone your goal down to a more precise and clear resolution.

     So if your goal is to become big and strong, and you’ve asked yourself some of the above questions, the next thing I would do is break your resolutions into an eating resolution and a training resolution.  And, by the way, even if, once again, that’s not your exact resolution, if you are after pretty much any goal that involves what I wax euphoric about here on the blog, then you probably need both a dietary resolution and a lifting one, as well.

     To get big, you need to eat big.  Determine how many calories you’re going to eat daily and how much protein you’re going to consume.  For mass-gaining, start with about 20x your bodyweight in calories on a daily basis.  And make sure you consume a gram of protein per pound of lean bodyweight.  If you’re, say, 150 pounds, then your resolution for the next two months should be to consume 3,000 calories and 150 grams of protein each day without fail.  That’s the kind of well-defined, measurable resolution that I’m talking about.

     In order to get big and strong when it comes to training, you need to have a goal of getting strong on a handful of compound lifts.  A quality goal would be to get stronger on good ol’ fashioned barbell back squats, along with bench presses, deadlifts, overhead presses, and barbell curls.  Those are just suggestions, of course, but they’re most certainly along the lines of what you should be shooting for.  That’s the what, but now you need a how.  In which case, something such as a Bill Starr-style heavy-light-medium program would be exemplary.  Which means that your training resolution could be to follow a Bill Starr H-L-M program for the next 2 months.  And now you have two specific, well-defined resolutions—one dietary and one involving training—that will help you to achieve your ultimate goal of simply getting big and strong.

     No matter your resolution, just make sure it’s well-defined and measurable.  That’s pretty much the point of this extemporaneous essay (that I wrote in one sitting without knowing what-the-heck I was going to actually write about, for better or worse; hopefully not worse).  But I would like to leave you with one other point before wrapping things up—and it probably deserves an essay all its own.  I have a feeling that the vast majority of all resolutions—no matter what they are or what they involve—fail to succeed because the person doesn’t want it (whatever it is) with all of her heart, mind, and soul.  Because when you want a resolution totally and completely, with every fiber of your being, and that goal is well-defined, precise, specific, and unequivocal, then achieving it will be a sure thing.