Wanting to ‘get stronger’ is not a goal. It’s a preference with no edges - nothing to push against, nothing to measure, no point at which you’ve succeeded or failed. Most trainees carry these preferences around for months and call them goals because nobody told them the difference matters.
A real training goal has a number attached to it. Not a rough direction, not a feeling - a number. A deadlift at a specific load. A bodyweight at a specific date. A set of pull-ups at a specific rep count. Without that, you’re not training toward something; you’re just training, and whatever happens will get quietly reclassified as what you meant all along.
The Problem With ‘Getting Leaner’
Body composition goals are where vagueness does the most damage. ‘Getting leaner’ is one of the most common things people say they’re training for, and it’s close to meaningless as written. Leaner than what, by when, measured how? Scale weight, body fat percentage, waist circumference, how clothes fit - these don’t always move together, and if you haven’t picked one, you’ll find yourself cherry-picking whichever metric looks best in a given week to decide whether progress is happening.
A more honest version: reach a specific waist measurement by a specific date, tracked weekly. Now you have something that can tell you whether what you’re doing is working - and when it’s not.
Specificity Forces the Uncomfortable Conversation
The reason most people avoid specific goals isn’t laziness. It’s that a specific goal can fail. A preference can’t. If you set out to hit a 140kg squat by March and you’re at 120kg in February, that’s a visible problem. It demands a response - more volume, better sleep, a programme adjustment, an honest look at whether the timeline was realistic. Vague goals never produce that conversation because there’s no point at which they’re clearly not working.
This is why specificity feels harder than motivation. Motivation is a mood. Specificity is a commitment.
One Number Is Enough
You don’t need four targets across four fitness qualities. Pick the one that matters most to you right now, attach a number and a date, and let everything else serve that. Most training problems are not programme problems - they’re precision problems. The programme is usually fine. What’s missing is a clear enough target to tell you whether it’s working.