Three Thoughts to Frame Your 2026 Fitness Goals
Sustainable: Select something you can stick with when you're at your busiest and most stressed. When setting 2026 fitness goals, sustainable exercise habits matter more than perfection. If you wait for calm waters to execute your fitness plan, you might be waiting a while—and most likely, that plan will be disrupted at some point. An added (and significant) benefit is that intense exercise and strength training are powerful stress relievers.
Sustainable also means selecting exercise that you can continue if you're injured or recovering from illness. Getting injured, having surgery, or experiencing illness is inevitable. That makes it all the more important to choose a safe and manageable form of exercise. Notably, a recent global consensus paper on exercise and healthy aging stated that when we're sick, hospitalized, or injured might be the most critical time to engage in resistance training and supervised strength training.
Avoid the fads. Smarter exercise should be a part of your identity. Set long-term fitness goals and choose behaviors that reinforce that identity rather than chasing short-term fitness trends or workout fads.
Seek a guide. We all do better with an expert coach or qualified personal trainer. I'm convinced this is true in business, athletics, finance—and absolutely true in fitness. The research is unequivocal: we do better when someone directly supervises our workouts and strength training programs. (I was trained by Joey and Randall at Discover Strength in Lone Tree, Colorado on Monday. My next workout will be with Jacob and the team at Discover Strength in Leawood, Kansas this Friday.)
For a deeper dive on goal setting for fitness, revisit this previously published post:
2 Mental Models for 2024 Goal Setting (or ANY Goal Setting)
Model 1: The Gap and the Gain
Dan Sullivan, founder of Strategic Coach, is known for teaching people how to think about their thinking. One of his most impactful mental models is called The Gap and the Gain. For decades, Sullivan observed that entrepreneurs (and human beings in general) make so much progress in various areas of their lives—including health and fitness progress—yet, they continue to be unsatisfied or even unhappy with their results. He refers to this as the “Gap.”
The Gap is when you measure your current progress against an ideal in the future. Because that ideal is always on the horizon, it leads to feelings of dissatisfaction. Even when you make real progress, the ideal keeps shifting further away.
Gap thinking involves measuring from a specific (where you are now) to the general (an ideal in the future). This concept has broad application and could apply to having a great marriage, cultivating a successful career, becoming wealthy, and of course, improving fitness and health outcomes. These ideals are very hard to achieve and thus, most people remain unsatisfied. Sullivan states that when you measure with Gap thinking, you simply can’t be happy or feel fulfilled. You feel like you have accomplished nothing because the ideal remains in the distance. We’ve all been in the Gap.
The Gain is the alternative: Instead of measuring from where you currently are to an ideal (the horizon), he counsels you to measure from where you have been to where you currently are. Gain thinking involves measuring from a specific (where you were) to a specific (where you are now).
Gain thinking is a great way to drive our motivation for our exercise and long-term fitness habits. Always measure backward from where you are now to where you started. Acknowledge how far you’ve come and let this fuel your motivation and confidence to move forward (always inspired by your ideals, but not measuring against your ideals). We can apply this to our exercise outcomes (blood pressure, body composition, muscle strength, aerobic fitness, 5k time) or our habits (e.g., averaging eight hours of sleep now versus seven previously; two strength training workouts per week over the last year versus a previous average of one per week).
Take action: As you set 2024 and 2026 fitness goals, make them measurable; be very clear about where you are right now. Then, as each quarter passes and as we draw near the end of the year, you’ll see significant progress. This progress is evidence of your growing competence—and competence fuels confidence.
Examples:
Instead of “Prioritize my strength training” as the goal, consider: From 48 strength workouts in 2023 to 100 in 2024.
Instead of “Prioritize my cardiorespiratory health and fitness” as the goal, consider: From 0.25 interval cardio workouts per week to 1.0 per week.
Instead of “Get lean!” as the goal, consider: From 32% to 27% body fat percentage.
Instead of “Improve my marriage,” try: “Schedule 12 date nights in 2024.” (At the end of the year, you can look back and see progress toward making the depth and quality of your relationship a priority.)
Model 2: Process Goals Over Outcome Goals
Prioritize process goals over outcome goals when setting fitness goals for 2026.
An example of an outcome goal is, “Complete my first half marathon.”
An example of a process goal is, “Run 3 times per week from January through April.”
In order to set process goals more effectively, spend time thinking about who you want to become. Next, pick the behaviors or actions that person would take and then connect your process goals to them—especially when building sustainable exercise routines.
Important reminder: Each of us decides who we want to become as well as the behaviors and process goals that bring us closer to that.
Examples:
Instead of “I’d like to PR in a marathon” or “run a 3-hour marathon” (a great outcome goal), you could write a process goal of: Increase my weekly mileage from 32 miles per week to 45 miles per week for 2024.
Instead of “Write a book,” you could write a process goal of: Commit to 1 hour of writing at my computer, five days per week.
Take-home message:
Quantify your goals so you can adopt a gain mindset for 2026. Set at least 50% of your goals as process-based fitness goals and connect these goals to who you want to become.
