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When I first started teaching exercise science courses and working with personal training clients, I noticed the same pattern repeating itself over and over across these two populations. Enthusiastic people would approach me with genuine excitement, telling me they wanted to "get healthy" or "get fit". I have a large number of students come through the intro-level courses often looking to get into better shape and this was extremely common, almost as much as in personal training clients. Their intentions were absolutely in the right place, and their motivation was real, but I could already see some predictable roadblocks ahead whenever I heard those vague goals.
Here's what I've learned after working with personal training clients and hundreds of students as university faculty in exercise science: Those well-intentioned statements aren't really goals. They are outcomes!
This pattern was what inspired me to create the goal-setting module for our Innova Vita Health and Wellness course. I wanted to give people all the tools and insights I wish my early 100-level university students had possessed from day one and that my personal training clients would learn over time with me.
From my observations, the biggest obstacle most people face isn't lack of motivation or willpower once people get started. It's the absence of a clear process which in turn leads to undirected sporadic attempts to improve health and fitness (think New Years). When your goal is simply to "get healthy," or “lose weight”, what does that actually mean for your daily life? How will you know when you've achieved it? What specific actions will you take tomorrow, next week, or next month to move closer to that outcome?
Without answers to these questions, even the most motivated person will eventually lose their way because they don't have a clear path forward or a way to measure progress along the way. Going back to passing New Years reference, this is what goes wrong with a lot of resolutions related to weight loss and improving health. There’s no clear step by step pathway, only a broad picture that includes going to the gym and trying to completely overhaul your diet in a few weeks time, which invariably results in both short-term and long-term failure.
The solution I give in the course comes from what many consider to be an unexpected source: the business world. The SMART framework was originally designed for corporate goal setting, but it translates seamlessly to health and fitness because the underlying principles work across any domain where you want to create meaningful change.
SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely. It is a framework that makes it nearly impossible to create a vague goal if you use it properly. Each element represents a question you need to answer when crafting your objective. Even a SMART goal with 3 of the 5 areas drafted will be more effective than a vague outcome statement.
Let me show you the difference this makes. Instead of "I want to get fit," you might end up with something like "I want to walk for 20 minutes after dinner on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for the next four weeks, tracking each walk in my phone calendar" as a basic starting point.
See how the second version gives you a clear target, a timeline, and specific actions? It tells you exactly what to do, when to do it, and how to track your progress. The distinction between attainable and realistic is really important here too. Attainable is about your capability, while realistic is about your context.
While SMART goals form the foundation of our module, we dig much deeper into what actually makes goals stick in the course. Understanding the difference between motivation and discipline is crucial because motivation comes and goes like the weather, but discipline builds the bridge between your current self and your future goals and long-term habits.
We also explore the different types of motivation that drive people. Intrinsic motivators come from within, like the satisfaction of feeling strong or the simple joy of movement. Extrinsic motivators are external rewards, like compliments on your appearance or winning a fitness challenge. Both have their place in a well-rounded approach, but knowing which ones personally drive you makes a huge difference in crafting goals that feel meaningful rather than like a chore and we have a lesson and activity around this important concept.
Perhaps most importantly, we spend time introducing some factors that drive habit formation in the goal-setting module, but even more as a course-wide theme. Creating lasting health changes isn't about relying on willpower forever, eventually everyone runs out of motivation. You want to build systems and routines that eventually become as automatic as your most basic daily habits. When you understand how habits form and how to work that knowledge into your SMART goals, you're going to be setting yourself up for long-term success.
The course teaches you how to identify cues that trigger healthy actions, how to reduce friction so your plan is easier to follow than to skip, and how to create satisfying rewards that reinforce your new behaviors.
Throughout our course, we integrate AI prompts as tools that can help you refine your goals and plans for various health behaviors covered in the course. At the end of the goal-setting module, we provide a specially engineered prompt that works with any chatbot to help you craft and polish your SMART goals based on everything you've learned in the module.
Here's what I want you to understand about these tools (and AI in general): AI tools, like chatbots, are most powerful when you understand the fundamentals of your area of interest first. While it might seem easier to just use the prompt, or ask it in plain English, and skip the learning, you'd be missing out on incredibly important foundational knowledge. Having a solid understanding helps you recognize when AI suggestions make sense and when they might be what most people call "AI slop." When you have a fundamental knowledge base, using the AI tools becomes more like having a knowledgeable conversation partner rather than just asking for answers without any real context. Without a basic knowledge base you lack a frame of reference to really evaluate the outputs.
Part of my mission when designing this course was to equip students with the foundation necessary to validate any source of information, whether it's from AI or traditional media. AI has made remarkable improvements, but it's not perfect, just like any other source meaning it needs to be evaluated like anything else.
Each module concludes with investigation activities that teach you how to use the deep research functionality available in many modern chatbots. For the goal-setting module, these investigations might have you exploring the neuroscience of habit formation or diving into different motivational theories that branch off from what we cover at a basic level in the main content. It’s also a great way to provide more advanced students with a way to really challenge themselves. The base level content of the course is presented for absolute beginners but these investigations have tier-level challenges based on your comfort level. So if you are a beginner, you may just do the investigations rated for beginners, but we have intermediate and advanced options too. If you are not confident at first, maybe after several more modules you will be and you can always revisit those intermediate and advanced level tiers. Then of course for those that are completely anti-AI they can skip it altogether along with our prompts. They will still get great information from the course but they will be missing a vital opportunity for growth.
The core module content gives you the fundamentals and prepares you for these deeper dives that require critical thinking. It's this combination of solid foundation plus advanced exploration that makes the learning stick and helps you become truly knowledgeable about creating lasting change.
What excites me most about this approach is how it sets people up for genuine, sustainable success. Instead of starting another fitness routine that fizzles out after a few weeks, you're building the skills to create lasting change and become self-sufficient in forming your health habits. The SMART framework becomes a tool you can use throughout your health journey, whether you're working on nutrition, exercise, sleep, or stress management in our later modules.
Once you master the goal setting process, "getting healthy" transforms from a vague outcome into a series of specific, actionable steps that actually lead somewhere.
If this behind-the-scenes look has sparked your interest, I encourage you to check out the complete Innova Vita Health and Wellness course to dive deeper into these concepts and start building your own sustainable health habits.
Innova Vita Health and Wellness: Lifestyle Chronic Disease Prevention - The first article in our behind-the-scenes series. See how our first module educates individuals about the role of exercise and nutrition in chronic disease prevention.
