Reaching 25,000 swings

Before leaving town for a holiday vacation in December, I reached my goal of completing 25,000 KB swings for the year! Granted, I didn't start the year with that goal, but, once I reached 10,000 swings, I set incremental goals of 5,000 more, then 5,000 more, etc., until reaching 25,000 was easily within reach.

As I reflected on this achievement, what three things occurred to me:

1. the importance of setting a goal,
   
2. the importance of setting easily achievable (based on past performance) incremental goals, and
   
3. the importance of tracking my progress.

Let's start with the the third one. If I had started out last year with the goal of reaching 25,000 swings, I might have gotten discouraged before I ever got started! Instead, I just decided to start writing down and tracking my workouts, and I started tracking swings separately from the rest of my workouts in a way that I could easily keep a running total across all workouts.

Once I started to keep track and see my progress, and get an idea of what was reasonable for me, then I started to set little mini goals for myself, such as "I want to get to 1,500 by the end of February." As I reached each of those mini goals, I was soon within reach of getting to 10,000 by mid-year. So, my confidence at reaching the bigger goals grew as I got closer.

One of the most fascinating things to me about doing this was how I gained momentum as the year progress. Out of the 25,000 swings for the year, 10,000 were completed between January 15 and July 14 (6 months) and 15,000 were completed between July 15 and December 16 (5 months).

Finally, the importance of setting a goal. This was most helpful on those days when I didn't especially feel like working out or felt that I didn't want to take time out of my busy schedule for a workout. Because I had this goal that I knew I could only reach with incremental progress, I could usually talk myself into a short swing workout - especially when I remembered that it only takes 5 minutes to do 200 swings (and half as long to do half as many). That made it a lot harder to talk myself out of working out!

So, tracking your slow, incremental progress with intermediate goals, and you are well on your way to getting to your large goals (and, all the benefits that come with it).

And, in case you are wondering, yes, I do have some workouts that the total number I completed that day was 10 or 20, but, they all added up in the long run toward my big goals!