Amazing fitness goals and how to achieve them

10.11.2025

Getting started and sticking with it, maintaining your level, or getting even better? Tips for your personal fitness goals.

Have you started “doing more exercise” for the third time? Or have you been wanting to beat your 5-kilometer time for a while now? Different goals require different approaches. Ultimately, we are most motivated when we know our goals and achieve them step by step. The great thing is that everyone has individual goals. What are yours? 

Fitness goal 1: Start, stickwith it, and reward yourself

Good intentions aside, many people find it difficult to overcome their inner demons and commit to exercising more on a long-term basis. This is usually due to a classic beginner's mistake: setting goals that are too ambitious. If you follow one of these many highly ambitious 4-week training plans, 3-day diets, and fitness fads and then don't see any results, you'll end up feeling frustrated. And frustration is a motivation killer. If you want to start exercising more (for the third time), you need a goal that doesn't scare you off but motivates you—and that you can realistically achieve.

Depending on your current fitness level, this may mean that you initially plan to go for a walk three times a week after work. You can also “condition” yourself to exercise by coming up with a reward for yourself. For example, you could say, “I'll only go to the sauna if I've exercised beforehand.” You decide what constitutes a reward for you.

You will see how quickly your overall fitness level improves through everyday exercises. Each additional milestone will then become a reward. 

Fitness goal 2: Change, lose fat, and build muscle

If you are pursuing a specific goal such as weight loss, you should be very clear about what you want to achieve. Because your weight does not say anything about your fitness.
Muscle weighs more than fat, so two people of the same weight may look completely different, or a heavier person may still be slimmer. People who exercise regularly have a lower body fat percentage and more muscle mass, which makes them look fitter.

Losing weight is therefore not just about losing weight. If you want to become fitter overall and shape your silhouette by losing weight, you need a balanced training program that includes endurance and strength training. The more muscle mass you build, the higher your basal metabolic rate will be—because it is your muscles that burn calories and thus fat.

The older you get, the more important this fitness goal becomes. Many 40-year-olds believe they are fit because they weigh the same as they did 20 years ago. However, this is not necessarily true: from the age of 30, the body loses up to 2% of muscle mass every year if you do not exercise regularly. Accordingly, the proportion of fat cells increases with age. So weighing the same at 40 as you did 20 years ago does not automatically mean you are fit. 

Fitness goal 3: Maintain your level, stay fit, and try new things

If you are healthy and feel good about yourself, you may simply want to maintain your fitness level. This also requires regular exercise and, of course, a balanced diet.
You can create new stimuli through more intensive training sessions (for example, running longer or faster or lifting heavier weights) or through variety: by trying out a new sport that breaks your established training and thinking patterns. The new stimuli not only stimulate the trained areas of your body, but also your mind—flexibility is the keyword!

Fitness goal 4: Supplementary training, improving performance, and staying flexible

Amateur and professional triathletes are the best example of how important supplementary training is for your own performance: In addition to their daily running, swimming, and cycling sessions, they have to train specific areas of the body in order to compensate for muscular imbalances, stay flexible, and consistently squeeze that last percent of performance out of themselves. This is because regular cycling, for example, causes athletes' muscles to shorten