7 Common Types Of Fitness Goals For Beginners

Different people exercise for different reasons. However, when it comes to shaping our bodies, there are some types of fitness goals that are alike or similar for both men and women.

The list below covers the most common fitness aims sought by the masses. Let’s look at these specific targets and discover how to achieve them. By setting and pursuing realistic goals, you can definitely find out a secret for lasting body change and save more time in your journey.

7 Common Types of Fitness Goals for Men and Women

1. Enhance general fitness

When you crave for boosting your overall fitness, it means you need a bit of everything. You just want to enjoy a satisfying workout at the gym without thinking too much about a detailed goal. It is better to prioritize improving what you are weakest at and body parts with low-hanging fruit.

For instance, if you already have great strength yet poor endurance, you can spend more training time on several straightforward progressions until it balances out.

2. Lose weight or fat

Maybe the most common fitness goal among people when starting an exercise routine is shedding weight, more precisely fat. From students, and middle-aged men to postpartum women, nobody wants to have a heavy body with a big belly.

However, crash dieting or over-exercising can lead you to nowhere but fatigue, and even the possibility of gaining weight again. Healthy weight loss is just around 1-2 pounds per week, and you had better take it slow and steady so that it turns into a lifestyle.

Besides regular workouts, you can adjust your eating habits, cut out lousy carbs, reduce your caloric intake, and increase your resting metabolic rate. Use some applications that manage your food and calorie intake to ensure you will not go overboard.

3. Build muscles

Among major types of fitness goals, stimulating muscles to grow or hypertrophy is also a sought-after purpose. Although this ambition is more popular among male gym rats who seek for a better look, it is completely feasible for women to attain.

To facilitate lean muscle growth, you are often recommended to consult a personal trainer for suitable sessions. Your journey should involve plenty of hard lifts, a mix of compound movements like squats and bench press, or isolation exercises that target specific muscles. During this time, high-calorie foods and an increased intake of proteins work great, too.

4. Have a toned-up body

Toning bodies is the combination of the above two types of gym body goals. In other words, it is a matter of losing fat and building muscles. This also requires both exercising consistently and modifying your eating habits.

For beginners, it may be difficult to decide if you need a calorie deficit or a calorie surplus to achieve this body goal. In fact, they simply cannot gain muscles and lose fat at the same time, so it requires long periods of muscle gain, then long periods of fat loss to make muscles visible.

Those who are new to the game can find this “bulk” and “cut” process a demanding and vicious cycle, but it is actually what “toning” means.

5. Improve endurance

Building endurance seems to be the hardest among common fitness goals, but it can bring you better stamina and a handful of benefits, especially when performing physically demanding tasks.

To attain this target, it is important to perform cardio or Tabata-style workouts and do 20-30 minute high-intensity interval training (HIIT) sessions with rowers or steppers.

Whatever you do, always push your limits and get your heart rate up. Try to tolerate the temporary discomfort you may encounter.

6. Boost flexibility

In the modern world, besides the elderly, many young adults have experienced a lack of flexibility because of a sedentary lifestyle or frequently sticking to a chair in an office. If improving joint flexibility is your goal, the key point to see the change is consistency. Practice often and perform ongoing sessions.

Though skeletal structure varies from person to person, you can maximize your potential range of motion. Your best bet is accomplishing regular static stretches and PNF stretches, but remember not to overdo it, or else you can get injured and in pain.

You can start with some Yoga poses, or work on mastering moves that involve great flexibility such as backflips, box jumps, and splits.

7. Improve athletic or sports skills

Pitching as much as possible to become a competent baseball pitcher? Or shoot and dribble again and again because you are a baseball lover? If you already have a favorite sport and want to brush up on relating skills, doing specific training is a smart choice.

Of course, it is not easy to achieve rapid progress, also it may require hundreds of training hours to accomplish your goal. However, with a proper approach as well as short-term and long-term goals for that skill, you can gradually hit the spot.

Final Words

With this review, we have given you an insight into several ubiquitous types of gym body goals. Whatever your aim is, it is essential to find your motivation, set attainable targets, and measure your process habitually.

Also, don’t forget to reward yourself for all the sweat you have dropped. Just make sure you are on the right track and you can reap the success.