Whether you're coming back from an injury, or just pushing yourself toward a personal best – measuring your progress can mean the difference between achieving your goals, or falling short. Orthopedic Surgeon and Team Physician Dr. Joe Bellamy discusses what goes into fitness planning, measuring goals against personal bests. Regardless of lifestyle, setting achievable goals and working toward them can create a healthy lifestyle that will allow you to take your fitness to the next level.
One, Two, Three, With Joe Bellamy
Q: What's the best way to achieve a personal best?
A: Exercise and fitness are an important part of anybody’s lifestyle for a number of reasons. But, in order to be successful in those endeavors it is important to set goals. When we have a player that’s injured we work with the training and medical staff to set goals for that athlete to achieve, where we set a goal and we achieve that goal and then we move on to the next goal in order to make forward progress.
Q: What are the keys to setting good goals?
A: I think regardless of your fitness level or what activity you’ve chosen it is important to set a goal that is attainable. Oftentimes people set goals that maybe are unrealistic and then it becomes discouraging when they aren’t attaining that goal. The best advice I can give is set something that is maybe not a huge goal but it is attainable and then also set up a time frame that is realistic. So, if you want to go from sitting on the couch to running a marathon you obviously have to give enough time for that to happen. You have to set those goals that can be attained in a reasonable amount of time and then you set the next goal and keep moving towards whatever your ultimate plan is.
Q: Are there any benefits to working out with someone?
A: If you have someone you work out with you tend to be more accountable and it’s much more likely you’ll achieve those goals as opposed to if you do it all on your own with nobody watching
