With most sports leagues cancelled and the school year coming to an end, athletes find themselves in a difficult position. There are no games in sight to show the payoff for all the hard work put in over the past months, and many athletes are finding themselves with low motivation or drive. Mentally, it’s similar to an athlete that is injured for an extended period and has no games to look forward to, plus significantly less connection and communication with teammates than they are used to. In sports psychology, we work on getting through these periods by using SMART goals.

SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound. We use these 5 areas to help athletes and other individuals develop both short- and long-term goals. One of the major pieces of motivation is the ability to see improvement over time, which motivates us to work harder. SMART goals help you create goals that are easy to measure and evaluate, which allows you to determine if your workouts are effective and motivates you to remain consistent with them as progress is seen. We break the goals down like this:

Specific goals are easily identifiable and clear, like improving mile splits for a 5k or improving free throw shooting. This helps to narrow focus and build a plan to address the goal that can be more easily tracked. Broad goals like “get better at basketball” are much more difficult to measure and evaluate, but there are many smaller more specific goals that would achieve this same effect.

The Measurable aspect is important, as it helps us track and evaluate whether we are succeeding at our goals. For free throw shooting, we’d evaluate this as a percentage made (i.e. 65/100 or 65%). In this instance, we want to take a baseline before we start training for the goal so we can effectively evaluate our performance, so be sure to measure on the first day or take an average of a few trials.

To make a goal Achievable, it must actually be possible! If you are running 20:00 5k races, it may not be achievable to run an 18:00 5k by the end of the month. Try to set smaller goals so it is easier to evaluate and reward yourself for the hard work, which helps keep motivation higher. Something more achievable may be “drop 10 seconds off of my 5k time over the next few weeks” or “improve free throw shooting 5% this month”. You’ll notice we included time-limits, and we’ll address that a couple sections from now.

Relevant goals mean that the goal should make sense regarding your chosen sport. If you are a runner, building your vertical jump height may be an irrelevant goal that doesn’t help us clearly evaluate any progress, even if it may be a decent measure of leg strength. However, it may be relevant for a basketball player, so each sport will have different areas of relevance.

Time-Bound goals have a specific start and end time. This period should also be realistic, as the goals mentioned earlier such as “improve free throw period 5% over the next month”. It is important to understand the limits of improvement and try to keep this in mind. Your long term goal may be to run 18:00 5k races, but if you are currently running 20:00, dropping 2 minutes off of your time in a matter of days or even a few weeks may be unrealistic timelines. We would try to look at smaller improvements over shorter periods so it is easier to look back and evaluate, and potentially change our training methods if no improvement is noticed.

Setting SMART goals is a great way to keep motivated while we wait for sports to fully resume and get back to work with coaches and teams. All of our psychologists are trained in statistics and can help you create, track, and evaluate specific goals over the summer to move you closer to your goals and prepare you for the resumption of athletic activities over the next few months. If you need help setting SMART goals, feel free to contact us at FPA Performance, the sports psychology team at Family Psychology Associates. Our psychologists can work with you on setting clear goals for the summer and overcoming the mental hurdles present due to the effects of COVID-19 on participation in athletics at this time.