Bar-Eli, Tenenbaum, Pie, Btesh, and Almog (1996) provide an example of such a study, where they demonstrated the benefit of setting specific goals in a muscular endurance challenge. Participants (university students) were tasked with completing as many sit-ups as possible within a 2-minute period. The things university students will do for course credit! 

​

To get a baseline measure, the exercise was firstly performed once per week over a 3 week period. The participants were told their baseline score, which was their best performance across the 3 tests, and randomly assigned to one of the following groups.

​

• No goal - Simply asked to perform sit-ups

• Do your best - Instructed to perform at their best

• Easy - the aim was to achieve a 10% improvement on the baseline score

• Difficult/Realistic - the aim was to achieve a 20% improvement on the baseline score

• Improbable/Unattainable - the aim was to achieve a 40% improvement on the baseline score

​

For the experimental stage, participants completed sit-ups twice per week (which included 1 test each week) for up to a period of 8 weeks. They were instructed not to do any additional sit-ups during the study, i.e. no additional practice.

 

The results showed all the goal groups outperformed the do your best and no goal group, in their ability to increase the number of sit-ups they were able to perform in 2-minutes. This provides support for the notion that setting specific goals will enhance performance.

​

Note: You don't have to just choose objective goals to meet the criteria of being specific. It is perfectly fine to set subjective goals with a self-referenced target (e.g. I want to improve my golf backswing technique from a 3 out of 10 to a 5 out of 10). However, you should include expectations of the changes required to reach the new level, and it would be recommended to include the input of a coach in the process.