Goal setting is one of the key mental skills we use with athletes, ahead of imagery, self-talk, and arousal regulation, and if you ask almost any coach how to set goals, you’ll likely hear the same five letters: S-M-A-R-T (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound). This acronym has been the default in endurance sport for decades. Once a goal checks those boxes, we consider it well-set and move on.
However, research in both exercise and sport has reassessed the evidence for this habit and determined that for coaches, SMART is not necessarily the right move.
The flaws of the SMART acronym in sports
In 2026, Exercise and Sports Science Australia published an expert statement on goal setting in exercise and physical activity. Their findings were clear: SMART came from business management practice in the 1980s and was never validated for exercise or sport. It flattens the evidence base into one recipe and misapplies Locke and Latham’s (2019) goal setting theory, which shows that “specific and challenging” goals only outperform alternatives when the athlete already has the ability to do the task, is committed to the goal, and gets feedback on progress. If we remove those conditions, as SMART does, then the goal that drives one athlete forward will push another out of the sport.
While some of the evidence referenced here comes from exercise and physical activity rather than sport and athletes, Healy and McEwan (2021) also explored goal setting in sport, and they argue that the applied advice has run further ahead than what has been tested on athletes. Goal setting does work, but it is not as simple as just using the SMART acronym.
A systematic review of 27 goal-setting interventions with athletes found that Locke and Latham’s theory was applied inconsistently and supported unevenly across almost all characteristics, including difficulty, specificity, proximity, source, and type, plus the moderators of ability, commitment, and feedback.
So the SMART acronym is not merely unvalidated; the theory beneath it has barely been tested on athletes, and where it has, the findings have been mixed.
None of this abandons ambition or specificity, though. We need to replace the recipe with a decision, summed up in one phrase: the right type of goal, for the right person, at the right time.
What the evidence says about setting better goals
For endurance coaches, these four findings matter the most:
1. Different athletes need different goal types
Specific, challenging performance goals (a sub-3:30 marathon, a 20-minute power target) work superbly for experienced athletes on a familiar task with good feedback. For novices or athletes coming back from illness or injury, the evidence favours learning goals (master a skill, acquire a strategy) and open goals (see what you can do over six weeks). In trials with insufficiently active adults, open goals produced more activity and more enjoyment than specific targets; one participant’s phrase became the finding’s signature, that the change “took away the trauma of failing.”
Sports literature shows that athletes differ in goal-setting style; some judge themselves against their own improvement, others against the people they race. Burton & Weiss’s (2008) model predicts that failure-oriented athletes may perform worse under a formal goal programme—a pattern demonstrated in an intervention with gymnasts (Pierce & Burton, 1998). Direct tests of that model remain limited, but coaches still benefit from identifying whether their athletes find goals motivating or oppressive.
2. Harder is not automatically better
This is likely to make coaches uncomfortable, as “make it scary” has become received wisdom in endurance sports. But meta-analytic evidence points the other way; moderately difficult goals beat both easy and hard ones. A very hard goal carries a low probability of success, while an easy one carries little incentive (Kyllo & Landers, 1995). This long-standing research has yet to be overturned.
Do not see this as lowering your athletes’ sights, but realize that an audacious “big scary goal” is a tool to use with conditions, not as the default.
3. Athlete motive predicts more than who writes it down
This may complicate the advice many of us have given for years. Self-concordance research separates autonomous motives, where the athlete wants this or relishes the challenge of that, from controlled ones like guilt, anxiety, other people’s expectations, and rewards (Sheldon & Elliot, 1999).
In athletes, autonomous motives predict attainment, flexible pursuit, and their well-being, while controlled motives are largely unrelated to attainment and track with ill-being (Smith et al. 2007; Healy et al. 2014; Ntoumanis et al. 2014; Gaudreau & Braaten, 2016).
The healthiest pattern is high autonomy, low control.
But here’s the part that should change your practice: Those motives are largely independent of who set the goal. An athlete can be handed a target by a coach and pursue it for entirely autonomous reasons. And an athlete can set a goal themselves and pursue it for controlled reasons, including because they have quietly matched their goals to what they think their coach or someone else wants (Maitland & Gervis, 2010).
So “let the athlete set it” is not the mechanism. It helps, and collaborative goals do beat imposed ones on commitment and adherence, but with the uncomfortable rider that coaches often believe they are collaborating when in fact they are imposing.
Protect the motive, not the authorship. Autonomous motives are supported by a coaching style that offers real choices, explains the reasoning, and acknowledges the athlete’s view (Mageau & Vallerand, 2003; Bartholomew et al. 2010; Smith et al. 2010).
Thus, the most useful question in a goal-setting conversation is not “what do you want to achieve?” but “why this, and why now?”
4. Goal setting is only half the intervention.
The research separates goal setting from goal striving: implementation intentions (‘when X happens, I will Y’), action planning, self-monitoring, and adaptive revision when circumstances change (Ntoumanis & Sedikides, 2018). A goal that no longer fits an athlete’s life is not a motivational tool, it is a source of guilt. Revision has to be built in as a legitimate outcome, not felt as failure.
Don’t ignore TrainingPeaks data during goal setting
Here’s the irony for any coach reading this on TrainingPeaks: The richest source of evidence about what an athlete responds to is the season they just finished, and it is already in the platform.
- The PMC shows how fitness was built and where it stalled.
- The Calendar shows what consistency looked like, month by month.
- Compliance shows which sessions survived contact with real life, provided you check a plan existed before reading the percentages.
- The comment stream holds a year of mood, pain, and motivation language.
- Race files hold targets against outcomes.
Feedback is therefore not a nice-to-have in the goal-setting process; it is one of the conditions that makes a specific challenging goal work at all. Reflecting back on the data in TrainingPeaks gives an objective story to the season. Asking an athlete to reflect without it leans on memory, and memory is a poor instrument that often compresses a season into its best and worst fortnights.
How we now set goals at HP3
At HP3 we rebuilt our end-of-season process around these findings. These five steps map onto the four stages the applied literature describes: preparation, setting, planning, and follow-up. Each exists because a specific piece of evidence says it should.
- The coach compiles the data before anyone talks about next year.
This structured review of the TrainingPeaks record builds hypotheses to discuss in collaboration with the athlete. “I think this worked because…Do you agree?” and “Things didn’t seem to work here because…is that right?” - The athlete reflects first.
Before the season review call, the athlete gets a copy of the data and last season’s goals. Then, before any new goals are drafted, they reflect on the season themselves: what happened, what it meant, how it felt, what it cost, and how much life headroom they have available for next year. Athletes give honest data only when honesty visibly changes what happens next, so the reflection shapes the plan, and questions are phrased as “what got in the way?” and never “why didn’t you…?” - The athlete drafts the goals, then the coach helps refine them.
Each draft carries an explicit type: outcome, performance, process, learning, or open. The type is a visible choice, rather than an accident of phrasing. It forces the question that SMART never asked: Is this the right kind of goal for this athlete this year? - Goals are agreed in a conversation, not assigned.
The review call follows the shared decision-making structure we use in the clinical world. We establish that choices exist, we lay out the options with their evidence, and we decide together.We then run three checks on every draft goal:
- Preference: do goals help this athlete or weigh on them?
- Motive: why this goal, why now, listening for guilt, obligation, and other people’s expectations
- Difficulty: moderate or maximal for this athlete this year?
We keep the drafts alongside the agreed goals, which audits the coach. If the agreed goals don’t resemble the initial drafts, imposition has crept in. This catches a coach drifting towards their own preferences, not the athlete drifting toward what they think the coach wants—only the motive question catches that one.
- Every goal gets an obstacle plan and review date.
Priority goals carry an if-then plan for the most likely obstacle. All goals are reviewed quarterly against the training data, and revised and retired are formal, respectable outcomes to a goal.Those reviews are also where the feedback framing is chosen. When commitment is wavering, showing the ground already covered can sustain it, and when commitment is high, showing what remains is the stronger motivator (Koo & Fishbach, 2008). This has not been tested in sport, however, so treat it as a hypothesis worth running rather than a rule.
What this means for your practice
The biggest shift for the coach is likely the sequence: evidence, then reflection, then goals, then plan. For the athlete it is ownership: the goals are theirs in origin and theirs in motive.
Goal setting stops being an annual act of optimism and becomes the front end of a system, reviewed quarterly, and revised when life demands it, which feeds into the next year’s plan.
The athlete who genuinely thrives on an audacious target still gets one, but the athlete for whom a missed ambitious target could result in them leaving the sport can get something that keeps them in it, and occasionally that means not setting any formal goals at all.
Ask these 5 questions before you file an athlete’s goal
- Do goals help this athlete or weigh on them? Ask it out loud before any goal is drafted. For some athletes, a formal goal programme is the wrong tool and a lighter charter is the right answer.
- What type of goal is this? Outcome, performance, process, learning, or open? Name it and check it fits where this athlete actually is this year, not where they were last year.
- Why this goal, and why now? Listen for guilt, obligation, and other people’s expectations. If you hear them, find out what the athlete actually wants before you file the goal.
- Is the difficulty right? Moderate or maximal, for this athlete, for this season. The scary goal needs ability, commitment, and feedback behind it.
- What happens when it goes wrong, and when do we look at it again? One if-then plan for the likeliest obstacle and a date in the diary to review. Remember, revised and retired goals are respectable outcomes.
The SMART acronym taught us how to phrase a goal, but the evidence tells us how to choose one, for whom, and how to ask why.
Tim Pigott is a chartered physiotherapist, academic and endurance coach. Founder of HP3, a team of coaches, clinicians, and sports scientists. Professor Amy Whitehead is HP3’s sport and exercise psychologist, and co-edited the companion volume this piece draws on. The season review pack template and the reflection questions described here are available for any coach who wants them.
References
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