How to Look At Your Goals for 2025

As 2024 winds down, many of us begin reflecting on the past year and planning for the next. While it’s tempting to focus on big, audacious goals, such as completing a marathon or achieving a specific lift, the true power of goal-setting lies in the process. This blog explores a different approach to setting goals—one focused on habits, consistency, and compounding results over time.

Rethinking Traditional Goal-Setting

In the past, you might have planned your year around a major event or milestone, like running an ultra or completing a Spartan race. While these are great motivators, they aren’t the only way to structure your health and fitness goals. Big events are meaningful, but they’re just one piece of the puzzle.

The real key to long-term success lies in process goals—the daily, often monotonous habits that build toward sustainable progress.

The Power of Small Daily Actions

Think about your daily habits like zooming in on an image. The closer you zoom, the harder it is to keep your target in frame, and even the smallest adjustments can have a massive impact over time. This is how habits work:

1. Good habits compound into meaningful improvements.
2. Bad habits accumulate into setbacks.

Change happens slowly—so slowly that you might not notice it day-to-day. Whether you’re gaining weight, losing strength, or improving your fitness, it’s often imperceptible in the moment. But over months and years, these tiny adjustments add up.

How to Audit Your Current Habits

Before setting goals for 2025, take some time to assess your current habits. Here’s how:

1. Look back at your schedule.

   • Use a tool like a Google Calendar or a fitness tracker to see how consistent you’ve been with workouts, diet, and other habits.
   • Identify areas where you’ve been excelling and where you’ve fallen short.

2. Ask yourself honest questions.

   • Are you eating fast food more often than you think?
   • How many workouts are you actually completing each week?
   • What small habits have you picked up that might be compounding negatively or positively?

3. Project forward.

   • If you continue your current habits for the next 10 years, where will you end up?

Setting Process Goals for 2025

Once you’ve audited your habits, focus on setting process-oriented goals. These are goals you can control and repeat consistently, such as:

• Training: Commit to six workouts per week, regardless of the specific type.
• Nutrition: Reduce fast food intake to once a month.
• Mobility: Add 10 minutes of stretching to your daily routine.

Process goals ensure progress because they emphasize what you can do today rather than what might happen months from now.

Examples of Process Goals in Action

1. Training Consistency

   • If you trained five days a week in 2024, aim for six days in 2025.
   • Track your workouts with a fitness app or wearable to hold yourself accountable.

2. Diet Adjustments

   • Replace one unhealthy snack per day with a nutritious option.
   • Start meal prepping to reduce reliance on fast food.

3. Lifestyle Improvements

   • Incorporate daily walks to hit 10,000 steps per day.
   • Prioritize 7-8 hours of sleep every night for better recovery and performance.

The Daily Over Decades Approach

In 2023, the Daily Over Decades challenge emphasized the power of consistency in building long-term habits. By focusing on the small, monotonous actions you take every day, you can achieve lasting results without relying on big, flashy goals.

If you’re interested in adopting this mindset, visit dailyoverdecades.com to learn more about the challenge and how to implement it in your life.

Make 2025 Your Best Year Yet

Setting goals for 2025 isn’t about creating a checklist of big events or lofty achievements—it’s about building the daily habits that will compound into meaningful results.

Take the time to review your year, assess your habits, and focus on the process. And if you want support in achieving your fitness goals, join the Garage Gym Athlete community at garagegymathlete.com.

Remember, if you don’t kill comfort, comfort will kill you.

 Garage Gym Athlete Workout of the Week

Podcast Transcript

Jerred: 

All right. Let's talk about setting goals for 2025, or at least a different way to start thinking about this and looking at it as we round out 2024 and we are going into a new year. This is the Garage Gym Athlete Podcast. I'm Jared Moon, and I want to talk about this because this is where I start thinking about.

The next year, we're here at the beginning of December, and that's really when, in all honesty, I start to slow down a little bit. I'm normally go trying to be super productive. But a couple of years ago, I started to really slow down in the month of December, try to assess what went well, what didn't go well over the course of the year.

So for 2024, looking back at what happened. And then trying to, project forward. What do I do, want to do? What do I want to accomplish? And the more I've done this, when I'm putting this in the lens of, personal development, fitness, health specifically those areas, really just trying to get better.

I don't really put these big goals on the calendar anymore. Like an event or, like I'll do things like this past year, I did an ultra marathon here in 2024. If you got the most recent update, I had signed up for a high rocks. We weren't able to complete it, but say, I want to put high rocks on the calendar for 2025.

When I used to sit down and set goals, that's what I would do. I'd be like, okay. You know what, here's what's going on in 2025. I got, I'm going to run this ultra, I'm going to do this Spartan race. And it would always be like some, a big event on the calendar. But I'm, while I'm doing those things, that's not typically how I'm really setting goals anymore, specifically when it comes to health and fitness, because it's just so much of a process, and then there are the outcome goals or the specific Like I want to do this thing.

I want to back squat this amount, but the real win, the real like victory is in the process. If you can dedicate yourself to the process, that's why we did the daily over decade challenge back in 2023 is just because if you can commit to the process, you are going to be far better off.

And so I want to give a lens through which to think about that and how to analyze where you're currently at. Because one thing that you can do are, just an example I like to use is if you have an iPhone or an Android, you could zoom in with it, right? You could pinch zoom as far as you possibly can.

And what you'll see when you zoom in, with something like at its max zoom, it's very hard to keep that. Whatever image it is in frame, like I'll use an example of like my son playing soccer. Like I want to film him in soccer, but sometimes I'll be so far away. I have to really zoom in. I have very small margin of error when I'm that zoomed in to keep him in frame with what he's doing.

If I want to like, really, focus in on him specifically on the field and I'm far away. And even though My actual hand movements. I don't might only be moving an inch up or down, but in relation to how far away I am and him being on the field, if I move an inch too far up, I'm looking at the sky.

Now I'm nowhere close to having my son in frame, or if I move an inch down, I'm staring at the ground or I'm staring at some the opposing team's cleats. I'm like not looking at him anymore, but I'm there. The fraction movements, right? It's just a little up a little down. It's not anything like these big gestures, right?

And it's because it's so far away. You have these small micro changes that can change the trajectory, the outcome of what's in frame. Now, given that example, think about that in your life, because it's the small time decisions that are going to dictate where you end up. And I always like to remind people that change happens slow.

Like it does, it's painful, but change happens very slow, but change happens slow in both directions. Good change happens slow and bad change happens slow. They both happen so, so slow that you don't even feel it. You don't know that you're losing weight. You don't know that you're gaining weight. You don't really know in the moment you're getting stronger.

You don't know if you're getting weaker, faster or slower. You don't really know. With all the, like the micro decisions, cause all we have is today, right? Yesterday's gone. Tomorrow's not guaranteed. All we have is today right now. So if you can fall in love with the monotony of like small little things that need to happen each and every single day, you're going to be better off.

That's why I love looking at process goals. So now in relation to analyzing what you're doing. What your habits are like, just start to look at yourself, try to do some sort of audit when it comes to health and fitness. And this audit can be over the last 24 hours over the last seven days.

Start to look at your schedule, start to write things down. What are you actually doing each and every single day? Like me personally doing an audit is pretty easy because I live and die by my Google calendar. Like I put everything in there, like when I'm working out, it goes on the calendar what I'm doing at work.

It goes on the calendar. It's almost like a journal for me. So I can even look back and see what's happening or what's not happening. And so I urge you to do the same thing. If you're like, if I asked you like, Hey, how often are you eating fast food? And you might be like, Oh realistically maybe twice per month.

But if we actually looked at it, maybe you have some sort of new routine and you're busier and you need to get food more frequently and faster. And so you're actually have increased that to several times per week and you don't realize it. And it's okay, that's okay right now, because change happens slow.

And you're not going to, you might be like, Oh I've been eating this fast food for two weeks and I don't really see any change. Maybe it's fine. It's not fine. Cause change happens slow. And so when you compound that action over time, where are you going to end up? If you continue down this path, where are you 10 years from now?

And you can do this in good and bad directions. And so that's what I urge everyone to do is look back over the last week, over the last month, and just assess yourself. How are you doing? It compounded over, daily over decades, as we like to say, like, where are you going to end up and this can be in this could be like super micro.

If you have a lot of great habits and you don't have a ton of bad habits and you're like, yeah what am I supposed to do? Maybe look specifically at your training. Are you is something being missed? Are you not doing enough strength? Are you not doing enough, zone to work? Is there something, if we were to, compound this out over 10 years, what would happen?

What would you be missing? What could you forecast? And that's just if you have everything really dialed in. And then same with your diet what does that look like if you keep doing the same thing for the next 10 years? But then that's not going to be most people who just have everything figured out and everything's dialed in.

What, where are you missing? Are you starting to skip workouts? Were you consistent in, that's why I love tracking how many workouts I do every single week because that's some, something that can slip if you're like, If you went from doing five to six workouts a week, every week for a year, and then you get busy, something happens, life changes, and now you're doing four or five.

It doesn't seem like that big of a D of a difference, right? But that's a significant difference when we compounded over time. So while you're still getting in the workouts and you're still fit and healthy, and you're still doing a lot of great things, something's going to change. Something will change.

If you go from six to five. Per week to four per week. And you compound that over a couple of years, something will change. Fitness is going to change. Body composition is going to change. Something will change, but it won't change right away because the margin of error, as they start to separate is small, but compounded over time, it gets larger and larger.

So hopefully that's making sense. When you make these small micro changes, you got to see okay, where's this going to end up over the next decade? So that's what I want to urge every garage gym athlete out there to do. Go introspective before you set any goals, like just review your last year. If you like, if you're like me and you have a Garmin.

And you track every workout you do on there or a whoop or whatever. If you use a wearable, I'll look back and I'll be like, Hey, how much, how many times did you actually train? Like you think you train six days per week. Does that, does the math that up? How many times did you actually train per week?

How many things came up to where you skipped a workout and something didn't happen. So I'm going to look back at that and I'm like, Oh, wow, 2023. I worked out this many times. 2024. I worked out this many times. Maybe I'm good with that. Maybe I'm not. And so I need to make that adjustment. Going into 2025 about consistency.

So now it's not, Oh, I want to run this race. I want to do Spartan. I want to do high rocks. It's not, it's nothing like that. It's it goes back to that daily over decades challenge. It's no, I need to make sure I'm just hitting these six workouts per week, no matter what they are. I'm going to hit these six workouts per week.

Same with your diet. Now we don't all log everything that we have in our diet, but is there any new habits you picked up, something you're doing that you weren't doing before? Is that going to compound over time in a negative or positive way? Just looking at all these things and setting the process goal.

So when you get to 2025, don't you like, you can have some of those bigger yeah, I want to run this race. I want to do this thing. I want to do a 5k. I want to run a marathon, all that. Those things are good to have. They keep you motivated. They keep you engaged in the training and they keep you, really like looking forward to something.

There's nothing wrong with those things at all. I think they're great for people to sign up for an event because it holds your feet to the fire for getting the training done and showing up for the event and doing it. Ultimately, how you're going to win at life is going to be the process goal.

So what are you doing each and every single day? What are you doing today? What's the monotony, the boring thing that you can fall in love with and do day after day to really see the most progress. So look back at your year, analyze it, see what you're doing and not doing, and then start to set that process goal for the next year.

And if, Hey, you're like, Hey, I love this idea of training more consistently or whatever. We're not necessarily doing this challenge again right now, but if you go to daily over decades. com it's just going to redirect you to a garage gym athlete page where I fully explain what the daily over decades project 2023.

So we're, like I said, this is not an active challenge. But all the rules and how we utilize it are there on that page. So go to daily over decades. com and you will see how that challenge works. And maybe it's something that you want to implement going into 2025. I think it's a phenomenal challenge. I think it can change your life.

If you're looking to something to push you, that's not a specific event. It's really focused on the process. Definitely go check that out. But that's it for this one. Thank you everyone for being a part of garage, gym athlete throughout 2024. And as you look to 2025, I hope we can help you crush your health and fitness goals.

If you are one of our athletes again, thank you. If you're not head over to garage, gym, athlete. com, sign up for a free trial. And we would love to have you. That's it for this one. Remember if you don't kill comfort will kill you.