Setting Goals

Setting realistic goals, and sticking to them, is an important part of fitness. We’ve been doing this goal-setting stuff for decades, and here’s what we’ve learned.

• Be realistic. Whether they’re for students or adults, goals should be challenging, but attainable. An unreachable goal will only be discouraging.
• Think short-term. Live for the moment. Goals must be meaningful and reachable in the near future.
• Write it down. Kids and adults alike benefit from writing out their goals and putting them where they can see them every day. Maybe on the fridge or bathroom mirror?
• Keep it simple. Goals should be straightforward and restricted to one major behavior. For example, “I’ll play soccer with my friends for 60 minutes each day for a week” or “I’ll increase my activity time by 5 minutes each week until I reach 60 minutes a day.”

Take Advantage of Our Tracking Tools

The President’s Challenge wants you to meet your goals, and we’ll help you (or your students) along the way.

Educators, you will be able to use our free software (coming in early 2011), Fitness File, to:

• Enter information about your students and their Physical Fitness Test scores.
• Create custom reports to track students’ progress.
• See which students qualify for awards, which you can order in our Shop.

If you’re an educator with an existing account, you can log in now to use the current version of Fitness File. We encourage new coordinators to wait for the new software to be released before creating an account.

If you sign up for the Presidential Active Lifestyle Award (PALA) challenge orPresidential Champions challenge, you can enter your activities and track your progress on our site. You’ll get an update every time you log in. Stick with it, and you’ll earn cool awards for your hard work.