DUMB Goals in Action!

Introduction

If you were a cyclist in your mid- to late-50s, and I promised I could help you improve your average riding speed by 5%, and/or lower the time of your 20-mile evening loop by an average of six minutes, while maintaining or even lowering the amount of time you spent training, would you be interested? Now let’s assume you aren’t a cyclist: would you still like to know how I’ve actually achieved these strides—among others—simply by setting a DUMB goal and working casually toward it? Well, read on. That’s what this post is about.

But first … what is a DUMB goal?

Years ago in these pages (here!) I derided the ballyhooed but also hackneyed “SMART” goals that motivational speakers like to trot out. SMART generally stands for  Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. I dislike this framework because it makes you decide in advance what success really looks like, when so often we have no idea. Consider workplace revenue goals: their feasibility is at the mercy of industry trends, the economy in general, and the skill of those trying to decide what a reasonable target really is. Only once in my thirty-plus-year career did a director push back; after a missed revenue goal, he told his leadership, “We don’t have a performance problem—you have a forecasting problem.” (He didn’t last long.)

Let’s consider a SMART goal of losing fifteen pounds by December 1. That’s specific, measurable, possibly attainable (depending on the person and how overweight he or she is), perhaps relevant (if a doctor recommended the weight loss and/or the person feels bad), and clearly time-bound. But is it a good goal? I think not. Suppose a person exercises a bunch, eats really well, and ends up only ten pounds lighter on December 1. He or she might feel bummed out at having failed. But what if he or she had actually lost fifteen pounds of fat and gained five pounds of muscle, but doesn’t know it? The specificity becomes a setback. The person may feel demoralized and less inclined to bother with the new lifestyle—which brings up another issue, which is that making this goal time-bound kind of suggests the project  is over, when of course a noble goal like a better lifestyle  should be a lifelong habit, regardless of silly metrics.

That’s why in a subsequent blog post (here!) I proposed an alternative: DUMB goals. This type of goal is Duplicate,  Unimpressive, Mealy-mouthed, and Best-effort. Am I kidding? Well, of course I always seek to amuse, but actually, I’m completely serious. Consider:

• Duplicate: A goal you failed at already—never mind what anyone else tells you—is a great goal to try again at because if an attempted improvement was important to you before, that probably hasn’t changed. Failing to achieve something attests only to its difficulty and is no excuse for giving up.
• Unimpressive: Too often, a goal puts too much emphasis on getting credit, on getting noticed. By gaining too much social payoff just for stating your flashy goal, you can actually reduce the likelihood of achieving it, because your ego gets stroked before you’ve even succeeded (as described here).
• Mealy-mouthed: Being too specific, as with the weight loss example described above, can set you up to feel like a failure even when real progress is being made. Being more vague gives better elasticity to the tricky, messy business of self-improvement.
• Best-effort: Defining success as pass/fail can lead to a sense that you’re done, or conversely that a goal is futile … and either way, you may be inclined to check—or strike—the goal off your list. Treating your goal as an ongoing attempt at improvement can keep it alive indefinitely.

But do DUMB goals actually work?

My original post about DUMB goals, being on the theme of New Year’s Resolutions, was more hypothetical than empirical. The idea was to shift the reader’s thinking about how to formulate a better resolution. But over the last two years—and especially the last ten months—I’ve actually made startlingly good progress on a DUMB goal of my own.

Here’s the goal: as I age, I want to build and maintain as much strength and vigor as possible, on and off the bike, while improving my balance so I don’t fall and break a hip when I’m 80.

How DUMB is this? Very. Is it Duplicate? Well, I’ve been fretting about the ravages of age for, well, ages—my first blog post on this (here!) was over 17 years ago. Is the goal Unimpressive? Yeah, I’d say—it’s not as bold as planning my first Tough Mudder or marathon; I mean, who doesn’t want to age gracefully? And is it Mealy-mouthed? Sure—it doesn’t apply any metrics. And it’s clearly Best-effort, with the vague “as much as possible” element that gives me all kinds of wiggle room.

Now, this isn’t to say a DUMB goal is no better than no goal at all. Instead of breaking a lofty aim down into very time-bound and measurable milestones, with progress tracked carefully, as one would with traditional goals, a DUMB goal like mine can be simply directional: without getting too meticulous about it, what general lifestyle changes might take me in the right direction?

And this, as I learned kind of by accident, is the secret sauce of DUMB goals: you can make huge strides by selecting just a few general behaviors which should bring the goal closer, and then focusing on the process of executing these behaviors as well as possible. Getting feedback on your progress in the  moment, as opposed to periodically measuring yourself against some (frankly kind of arbitrary) goal, turns out to be incredibly powerful. I love this quote from an article about parenting in the NY Times: “A Dutch father of three told me about his Buddhist-inspired approach: total commitment to the process, total equanimity about the outcome.”

General behavioral change #1: balance saucer

I wrote already about my balance saucer, here. And it’s been great. I ditched the directions and started with just a vague idea of the kinds of motion I wanted to do (e.g., tapping the front edge of the saucer on the floor with both feet on the saucer; tapping the back edge; tapping forward on one foot; backward on one foot). At first I couldn’t even do them all; the backward-on-one-foot seemed impossible. But it wasn’t, and when even that got too easy, I started adding in other stuff to do on the saucer: standing on one foot pulling a knee to my chest; standing on one foot and sticking a leg out straight; doing a slow, all-the-way-down squat; putting on my shoe and tying it while standing on the other foot. I avoided the drudgery of trudging toward milestones; my saucer tricks are more like what the Cat in the Hat would do (e.g., now I’ll balance on the saucer with this fishbowl on my cane!) or the ways Tom, of Captain Najork fame, enjoys just messing about. Maybe I’ll work up to a one-legged squat, or juggling while tapping on one foot, or doing all this while drunk (kidding!).

Though I had no objective other than to buy this saucer and use it, I can tell you now my balance has improved significantly. For example, I can now ride the white line of the road shoulder on my bike, not just coasting, but pedaling at full power, even out of the saddle. (It’s rare to learn a new trick after forty-five years in this sport.) Not only that, my core seems a lot stronger: my back never hurts anymore (knock wood), and basic tasks like putting on socks and shoes have become easier and more fun.

General behavioral change #2: join a gym

Lots of people join gyms, and then they don’t go, and they feel bad, and they fall behind in their SMART goals, and the whole thing is just a big drag. But I’m the world’s cheapest man, so when I join a gym I actually go, just to get my money’s worth. Meanwhile, half the reason I joined is that my wife wanted me to, so I could go with her and, as needed, kick the asses of any creepy guys there. (That’s the theory, anyway; so far everyone has behaved, which is a big disappointment.) So when my wife signs up for a class, I head over there with her, because honestly I seldom have a good excuse not to.

Now, I could ruin all this by making SMART goals around the gym workout, like gaining or losing some number of pounds, or adding some measurable amount of visible bulk, or being able to bench press some specific weight. But I’m too DUMB for that, so all I did is get a tour from the gym staffer, showing me a generic circuit training regimen that is popular, and that’s all I do, with no real programmatic rigor other than always being in motion. I get it that if you want to become huge and swole via a specific machine, you have to sit there for fifteen minutes between sets, scrolling on your phone, so your muscles “recover” or some damn thing, but that’s not a good use of my time.

I started off setting the machines to really low weight, just to keep from maiming myself, on the assumption that anything is better than nothing. I do fifteen minutes of cardio on  the elliptical machine to warm up, then do my circuit training, in order of whatever weight machine is open next so I don’t have to stand around waiting for some dude on his phone working toward a SMART goal. My routine takes almost exactly an hour. Now, as long as I’m there I might as well do a good job, which means paying attention to how my body handles each exercise so I can gradually, but safely, increase the weight over time. And since all the muscles in my body other than my legs have been neglected my entire life, progress is swift even at my advanced age. On the leg press I’ve gone from 90 pounds last October to 155 pounds today; on the rowing-esque machine I’ve gone from 35 to 80; on the shoulder press from 20 to 55; and so on. As with the balance saucer, working toward a DUMB goal helps keep things fun and stress-free. It’s hard to miss developmental milestones when the only one you have is “go to the gym a few times a week.”

And has all this paid off? It sure has. It’s a fun new routine with my wife, biking to the Y and back for our workouts; the improved core and back strength I touted earlier is probably partly due to this regimen; and, believe it or not, the arm warmers in my cycling costume stay up better than they used to. In fact, my biceps look a bit less like the almost two-dimensional blades of an oar and more like normal arms (though I dare not suggest they’re muscular, at least not yet). I’ve gained seven pounds, and it’s not in my belly so I’m going to call it an improvement. And, as you’re about to find out, the weight room circuit training might actually be helping with my cycling.

General behavioral change #3: use a power meter

About a year ago I bought a new road bike. As detailed here, it’s a totally sweet machine, and even came with a built-in power meter (that is, a strain gauge in the crankarm), which measures my output in watts and sends it to my bike computer. The power-meter-capable bike computer is sold separately, and after a brief struggle—dragged out by misplaced faith in AI—I got it working just in time for the new year, so I could switch platforms without messing up last year’s stats. Figuring that this new tool could probably help me somehow in my DUMB goal to age more gracefully, I started fiddling with it during my rides, studying the numbers and wondering vaguely, in the spirit of Alice as she tumbles down the rabbit hole toward Wonderland, how its data could help me improve. What I eventually realized is that my average power output for a ride exceeds what I’m doing at various points during it, and this represents a major area for improvement.

Let me explain. On a typical ride, my power output will average around 210 watts (or 250 “normalized” watts, meaning the average after all the very low readings from almost coasting, etc. are discarded). So I have been challenging myself during rides by asking, “Why is my output below 200 watts right now?” And for that matter, why should it ever be below 200, if I know I’m capable of maintaining that? Unless I’m doing a tricky descent, there’s really no good reason. To have a wide variance in effort during a ride just boils down to laziness (albeit a less drastic version than coasting when you could pedal). Despite my long tradition of making myself suffer during rides, I also have the human habit of conserving energy where possible, instinctively. Once I started paying more attention to my power output in the moment, throughout the ride, I started seeing the duration of my standard evening loop drop, and then drop some more.

Now, managing my effort better on a ride, nipping and tucking the lazy bits, might not seem like a game-changer; I mean, I get home a couple minutes earlier but so what? Well, as I eventually realized, going harder, consistently, all the time, actually improves your fitness. I mean, duh! It kills me how long I took to realize this actually, since it’s so obvious. But what I found is that the more I managed to keep the intensity up, ride after ride, the faster I got, and the more fun I had, and the more motivated I got. I discovered that the biggest improvement was in my power output while riding in the saddle, probably due to the increase in my core strength from the balance saucer. The muscular strength from the gym must be a factor too, because my fitness just seem to start to compound, like a freakin’ 401(k).

Improvement by the numbers

Here are some numbers to illustrate how crazy my progress has been. It’s a bit hard to compare my performance since a year ago (since during that period I had to alter my evening route due to a road closure), but my average speed over my longer (mostly weekend) rides went from 15.1 mph last August to 16.0 now, with most of the improvement coming since March, when my average was 15.2 mph. That’s a 5% improvement in speed, for the longer rides, in about four months.

But you know, my average speed during longer rides is a bit diluted, because loafing is naturally a bigger part of a 65-mile weekend ride with friends. My 20-mile after-work solo spin represents about three fourths of my rides, so this is where most of my fitness is built. It’s also where my improvement has been the most dramatic: last March my solo loop took me, on average, 1:24 (an hour 24 minutes), and this past month only 1:18. Can you imagine shaving six minutes off a 20-mile loop? And it’s not just that I’m bothering to ride faster; I’m capable of riding faster—much faster. My best time for this loop last March was 1:23, and a couple weeks ago I did it in under 1:14. Nine minutes faster. Are you kidding me?

But wait, this gets even better. I happen to track my total exercise duration pretty closely because I do an online DIY training contest with my family, and when I compare July 2025 to this past July, I see that my total duration actually declined significantly, from 58:12 (58 hours 12 minutes) in July 2025 to 45:26 last month. It’s nuts: I’m training less and my performance is soaring. All because I keep adding balance saucer tricks, gradually upping the weight on the gym exercise machines, and striving to maintain higher power throughout my rides. All in the service of this one DUMB goal.

And here’s probably the best part: all of my improvement has been, ultimately, gravy. Sure, I’m closely measuring and tracking my power, time, and speed on the bike, and my weight selection in the gym, but not in the service of holding myself accountable to anything. If this rate of improvement levels off next month, or even starts to drop, I won’t get discouraged, because remember my goal: to build and maintain as much strength and vigor as possible, while improving my balance, as I age. All I have to do is not decline. Actually, to not decline too fast. Best-effort!

Unimpressive

A final note: I want to emphasize the “U” in this DUMB goal: unimpressive. Consider how bored you’ve been getting over the last few paragraphs. That’s because, as important as my progress is to me, you couldn’t care less—and shouldn’t. This is why I think goals should be personal, and essentially private. I only present my experience to you as an illustration of what you yourself may achieve if you stop beating yourself up with SMART (or even just traditional) goals, and start thinking DUMB! Good luck with it!

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Ageing Focus - Make Balance a Habit!

Introduction

Last week’s post, though perhaps an amusing romp, wasn’t very responsible. I mean, why showcase my bad habits? Whose idea was that, anyway? I hope I didn’t come across as condoning any of those behaviors (though honestly, as odd as they are, you’d have to be some kind of kook to adopt them). This week I hope to provide a whole-grain, high-fiber, wholesome corrective. I’m offering up sincere and helpful advice here and I will try my best to make it amusing somehow.

Some background

My younger daughter is home for the summer and perhaps being around her vivacious youthfulness emphasizes how fricking old I’ve gotten. I guess I’ve reached the age where I worry more about my advancing decrepitude than reveling in whatever vigor I still have left. Sure, I can still make my bike go pretty fast when I dig deep, but I also dread the prospect of, say, my back going out for no good reason. (A buddy of mine, though he is still athletic and does all kinds of yoga, threw out his back putting on a sock.) I contemplate how to preserve my physical faculties over the last few decades of my life.

Strength and heart health are all well and good, but I lately I’m putting more focus on balance. Seventeen years ago I read a fascinating New Yorker article about the role balance plays in graceful ageing, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. The article, by the doctor/professor/writer Atul Gawande, is called “The Way We Age Now.” (My friend P— and I have a running joke about Atul Gawande. P— is a doctor, and I fancy myself a writer, and we complain to each other how Gawande is a better doctor and writer than both of us, and is also better looking; we naturally assume he’s even seduced our wives at some point.) In the article Gawande describes how he tagged along with a Dr. Bludau, a geriatrician, during a routine physical exam of an 85-year-old woman:

It seemed to me that, with just a forty-minute visit, Bludau needed to triage by zeroing in on either the most potentially life-threatening problem (the possible metastasis) or the problem that bothered her the most (the back pain). But this was evidently not what he thought… The danger for her was losing what she had. The single most serious threat she faced was not the lung nodule or the back pain. It was falling. Each year, about three hundred and fifty thousand Americans fall and break a hip. Of those, forty per cent end up in a nursing home, and twenty per cent are never able to walk again. The three primary risk factors for falling are poor balance, taking more than four prescription medications, and muscle weakness. Elderly people without these risk factors have a twelve-per-cent chance of falling in a year. Those with all three risk factors have almost a hundred-per-cent chance.

What is to be done?

How do I address these three risk factors?

1. Being an athlete is a non-negotiable part of my lifestyle, because cycling is a) fun, b) something I have enough experience in that it’d be a shame not to do it, and c) my number-one way to burn off stress. Cycling addresses the strength part of my ageing, to a point. (I know that ideally I should do core exercises, join a gym, do yoga, etc. and I’m trying to muster the resolve to take those things up.)
2. In terms of prescription medications, I’m not sure how feasible it is for any of us to avoid needing them when we’re old. It’s not like we can just resolve to go without. I’m lucky enough to be blessed with low cholesterol, and my blood pressure is decent, and so far I have no risk factors for diabetes, but you just never know what I may need for this or that ailment in my codger years.
3. Balance: this is the area where I think I can make the biggest difference.

How can we improve our balance?

I’d like to think that being a cyclist automatically gives me great balance, and of course it can’t hurt, but I don’t think it’s actually enough. I learned this when I was doing physical therapy after breaking my femur. As we began my regimen, my physical therapist asked me what my goal was for the therapy. As I’ve explained in these pages, I’m not actually that into goals, but this time I had one. “I want to come out of this better than I was before,” I declared. After all, I had a gym to work in and an expert to guide me … why not dream of shoring up some of the classic deficiencies of the pure cyclist?

To start with I had to learn to walk all over again, and realized in the process just how complicated walking is. With every step, the back leg has to swing forward, the knee bent so your foot doesn’t hit the floor, and then you have to plant that foot and swing the other leg forward, and that swinging is more rhythmic when we realize. But because I didn’t trust my bad leg to bend properly, I was kind of swinging it around sideways so I could keep it straight, and thought I was doing pretty well until my physical therapist, laughing, told me to walk toward a mirror and watch myself. I looked like a drunken zombie.

After relearning how to walk, one of the toughest things I did in that gym was a toe-tapping exercise on a fairly unstable platform. It was basically a square plank of wood with a half-cylinder under it (i.e., a half-circle cross section), kind of like a teeter-totter that you stand on. I would start by standing on the plank, balancing so it wouldn’t tip forward or back. Then I’d tip the plank forward until its front edge tapped the floor, and then rock back until the plank was level again, the slower the better. I’d do this ten times, and then I’d switch to rocking back, to tap the back edge of the plank on the floor, return to level, and do that ten times. Once I mastered that with both feet, I learned how to do it standing on just one foot. Oddly, I was no better at this with my good leg than my recently healed one, but in time I went from incompetent to totally proficient, even after adding in a barbell in one hand to put me slightly off balance. I cannot tell you how stoked I was to have learned a new trick that I couldn’t have done before my accident. I actually was better than before.

So now, with Gawande’s article in mind, I want to continue that trajectory of actually improving my balance. The fun way is to ride indoors with my bike on rollers, when it’s too dark and/or wet to ride outdoors. The less fun, but logistically easier, way—and, more importantly, the way I can recommend to you, albertnet reader—is to do the PT balancing trick on a balance saucer. You can buy one of these (one manufacturer’s product name is “Wobble Balance Board”) for about $20. This is even harder that what I did in physical therapy.

The regimen

The great thing about the balance saucer is that you can do your whole routine in 5-10 minutes. (I suppose this duration will vary as you become more proficient, and based on how much you want to do.) My current regimen consists of the following exercises, in sets of 10 repetitions each:

• Standing on both feet, tap the front edge of the saucer on the floor
• Standing on both feet, tap the rear edge
• Standing on one foot, tap the front edge
• Standing on one foot, tap the rear edge
• Standing on both feet, tap the right edge
• Standing on both feet, tap the left edge

I hold a barbell in one hand, and after the first five reps I pass it to the other hand. If I feel like it, I pump the barbell in the air for extra exercise and instability. (I plan to figure out other cool things to do on this saucer, maybe even incorporating my upper body.)

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, and five movies totaling two minutes at 60 frames per second is therefore worth about 7.5 million words, here are videos showing the exercises:

(Video credit to my daughter, expertly wielding her superfly non-phone camera.)

Don’t be surprised if it takes a while to get good at this. When I started up again (over a decade after my physical therapy days), I was pretty wobbly and struggled for a while.

Make it a habit

Did you notice in that video that I wasn’t in a fancy studio with mirrors and mats, wearing PrAna yoga pants and fancy workout shoes and headphones and a fitness tracker? All you need for this is the saucer and a pair of shoes with good, grippy soles. With worn-out or loose-fitting shoes, I have a lot of trouble, and if I try to do this barefoot my feet slide off. But other than that, no special gear or preparation is required, not even a warm-up. That said, this activity is oddly strenuous given how low-impact (actually, zero-impact) it is. During winter, when I’m working from home and stuck at my desk with my blood congealing, almost like suspended animation, I like to take a break and do my balance regimen to get my blood flowing. It really warms me up.

Making this a habit is key. Initially you’ll need plenty of repetition to develop the balance needed for these exercises, and then you’ll want to maintain that consistency so that five, ten, and twenty years from now you won’t have lost the ability. It’s kind of interesting to ponder how well we could maintain this, if we do it daily … can you imagine having this kind of balance at 80? Assuming we don’t, at least we’d be declining from a pretty decent height of capability. I think that’s well worth pursuing.

Postscript

A few more notes, as I have used this thing for a couple years now:

Make sure your shoes are not only grippy enough not to slide, but are completely dry before doing your balance regimen. I started in on my routine once, months ago, when my shoes were a bit wet (though I thought I had wiped them enough on the mat). My saucer squirted out from under me and I fell, wanging my wrist. Not all saucers have the same anti-slip texture; my brother has one (from the same manufacturer as mine, but newer) that is much grippier. I will probably buy some of that sandpapery-textured tape you put on stairs and add it to my saucer. So be careful!

Not all these saucers have the same depth, so get one that is appropriate for your balance level (which may have a lot to do with your age). I recently tried my mom’s saucer and it’s far shallower than mine, which makes the exercises vastly easier (too easy in my case, but probably much better for, say, an octogenarian). Mine is four inches deep; I have seen three-inch versions and even 1.5-inch versions available online.

This article (also available in a schlockier form here if you get blocked by a paywall) suggests that a good measure of your body’s effective age is how long you can stand on one leg, especially your non-dominant one. The doctor who wrote the article cites Mayo Clinic research and concludes (as paraphrased by ChatGPT), “While balance tests offer a simple method to gauge physical aging, incorporating balance training into regular exercise routines is crucial for sustaining overall health and mobility.” Running the calculation cited in the article, I have determined that a typical person my age ought to be able to stand on his or her non-dominant leg for about 22 seconds. That seemed way low to me, so I tried it out. I stood on my left leg for a couple of minutes, no problem, and then I started to get bored so I passed the time by doing the Wordle, then added stickers to my Wordle snapshot before sending it to my daughter, and finally, after over eight minutes on one foot, I was really bored and my leg and foot were starting to hurt so I bagged it. Needless to say, this balance regimen really works!

Another postscript

More recently I came across an article suggesting that a good balance challenge is to tie your shoe while standing on one foot. This capability is said to bode well for preserving balance into old age. I didn’t find this much of a challenge, and decided that tying my shoe while standing on the balance saucer would be a better trick. It is, and now I’ve incorporated it into my saucer regimen. Check it out:

If you perceive that the above video ran a bit long—i.e., that it took me longer than necessary to tie my shoe—it’s because of the role vision plays in balancing. As it turns out, where we look has everything to do with balance. If you close your eyes while on the saucer it’s almost impossible to do the taps, etc. described in this post. And I’ve found that looking at my shoe while balancing on the saucer totally messes me up. Something about locating ourselves in space is instrumental to balance. Only if I look out into the room can I tie my shoe while on the saucer.

Give it a shot and let me know how it goes!

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