Having competition is a great way to help you stay motivated toward achieving your physical goals. Competition not only gives you an opportunity to accomplish your performance and mastery goals but also adds a deadline to these goals which can motivate you to put more effort in. This drive will help you be more consistent and to achieve your goals faster.

Having challenges and goals beyond health and fitness, such as races, is great to help keep you in a competitive mind frame that refuels your motivation. Another reason why challenges are great is because they usually have a deadline. If you have a 5k race you want to run in October, then you have a specific time frame to train for your goal which can help you push yourself harder. 

Another way to give yourself good competition and boost motivation is having a running partner to train with who is pursuing the same goal as you. This can help you be motivated to train consistently with them and on your own.  You can also just have challenges for yourself.

For instance, if you walk a mile every morning you can challenge yourself to work up to 3 miles every morning by the end of the month. Or you can challenge yourself to eat only nutritious calories for one week. Creating challenges and having something to work toward like this helps to refuel your motivation.

Here are examples of challenges that you could try to boost your health and fitness progress:

• Bike Race

• Bodybuilding Competition

• Tough Mudder

• Swim Challenge

Here are some races in Tucson this fall that can help you set a goal and work toward those improvements.

• Whetstone 5k

• TMC Tucson 10k

• Tucson Wicked 1/2 Marathon

• Blacklight Run

2 Important Tips for Choosing Challenges and Goals:

Tip #1. Make sure you choose a goal that YOU are interested in and want to achieve, because interest in your goal is the only way you will be motivated to achieve it. It’s also important to focus on mastery goals because it shifts your drive to a more positive mindset and can be way more effective when it comes to achieving goals.  For example, focusing on improving your tennis playing abilities instead of just on the number on the scale.

When you are focused on being better every day and setting the bar higher for yourself you are always improving.  Performance only goals such as losing a certain amount of weight or just getting through a workout plan can lead to relying on a situation and it is more likely that you will quit when it gets tough.  Learn more about mastery goals in our Fitness Goals Bucket List blog post.

Tip #2. Once you have a good goal, the next step, which is very important, is to write it down. “A 2015 study by psychologist Gail Matthews showed when people wrote down their goals, they were 33% more successful in achieving them than those who formulated outcomes in their heads.” This alone is a great motivator. Once you have autonomy goals that you want to accomplish for yourself, all that’s left is reminding yourself of these goals and the end results every day so that you keep pushing yourself to that finish line.