SMART Goal Setting for Pilates Teachers: Are You Setting Useful Client Goals?
“I want to get stronger.”
“I want to improve my posture.”
“I want better balance.”
“I want to reduce my back pain.”
As Pilates teachers, we hear statements like these all the time.
But while they tell us something about what the client wants, they don't necessarily give us enough information to know what the client actually wants to achieve, how we'll measure progress, or how the goal should influence our teaching.
That's where goal setting becomes interesting.
And it's also why SMART goal setting for Pilates teachers is about much more than simply remembering what the letters S-M-A-R-T stand for.
Why do we set goals with our Pilates clients?
Goal setting is commonly used in rehabilitation and healthcare, but the research is more nuanced than you might expect.
A Cochrane systematic review by Levack et al. found very low-certainty evidence that goal setting may improve outcomes such as self-efficacy and health-related quality of life. However, there was no conclusive evidence that goal setting itself improves activity, participation, or engagement in rehabilitation.
So I don't think it's particularly helpful to tell Pilates teachers:
“Goal setting is evidence-based because it improves client outcomes.”
The evidence doesn't support that claim.
Instead, I think goals can be useful as a clinical tool.
A good goal can help us understand what matters to the client, define what we're trying to influence, and give us something meaningful to evaluate over time.
That brings us to a more useful question:
What makes a client goal useful?
Start with what the client actually wants
Imagine your client tells you:
“I want to improve my balance.”
It's tempting to immediately think about exercises that challenge balance.
But before we choose an exercise, we could ask:
“What would better balance allow you to do?”
Perhaps the client says:
“I'd like to feel more confident walking down the stairs.”
Now we're having a different conversation.
We're moving from an impairment or capacity to an activity that matters to the client.
And that distinction is important.
It doesn't mean balance isn't worth assessing or training. It means that improving balance isn't necessarily the client's end goal.
The client may care about being able to walk down the stairs confidently.
That's the outcome we need to understand.
SMART goals can help us make that goal clearer
Once we've identified a meaningful client goal, we can use the SMART framework to make it more specific and measurable.
SMART stands for:
S — Specific M — Measurable A — Achievable R — Relevant T — Time-bound
But there's an important caveat here.
SMART wasn't developed specifically for Pilates or rehabilitation. The acronym originated in management and organisational goal setting, and the exact meaning of the letters has also evolved over time.
So I wouldn't present SMART as a proven rehabilitation intervention.
Instead, think of it as a practical framework that helps us ask some useful questions:
What exactly are we trying to achieve?
How will we know if anything has changed?
Is this a reasonable goal given what we know right now?
Does it actually matter to the client?
When will we review it?
The framework helps us refine the goal.
It doesn't tell us what the goal should be.
That's where the client-centered conversation comes first.
The importance of being able to measure change
Once we have a specific goal, we also need to think about where the client is starting.
For example, imagine the goal is:
“I want to walk for 30 minutes without stopping.”
If the client currently manages 10 minutes before needing a break, we have a baseline.
Now we have something we can revisit.
But measurement doesn't always mean using a complicated test.
Depending on the goal, we might be interested in:
Time
Distance
Repetitions
Load
Assistance required
Range of motion
Confidence
Perceived difficulty
Symptoms
The important question isn't:
“What can I measure?”
It's:
“What measurement would actually tell me something useful about the change we're interested in?”
That's a much more useful question for Pilates teachers.
And what about the capacities behind the goal?
This is where your clinical reasoning comes in.
If your client's goal is:
“I want to be able to get up from the floor without using my hands.”
You might consider whether different capacities could be influencing their ability to perform that task.
Perhaps strength is relevant.
Perhaps mobility.
Perhaps balance or postural control.
Perhaps confidence.
But these are hypotheses, not conclusions.
We don't want to automatically assume:
“They can't get off the floor, therefore they have weak legs.”
We need to gather information and decide what is actually relevant for that individual.
The goal tells us where we're trying to go.
Our assessment and clinical reasoning help us understand what might be influencing the person's ability to get there.
And that's where things start to become useful for programming.
A goal shouldn't just sit in the client's notes
One of the things I want Pilates teachers to think about differently is what happens after the goal has been written down.
A useful goal should actually be useful to us.
It should give us something to work toward and something to come back to.
We can establish a baseline, work with the client, and then ask:
What's changed?
Are they closer to the goal?
Has their capacity changed?
Has the activity become easier?
Has their confidence changed?
Is the original goal still relevant?
And if things haven't changed, what have we learned?
This doesn't mean that we can prove our Pilates program caused the change. There are too many factors involved in a person's health and function to make that conclusion from a single reassessment.
But we can collect information.
And that information can help us make better decisions about what to do next.
SMART goal setting isn't about writing the perfect sentence
I think this is where SMART goal setting can sometimes become overly complicated.
The point isn't to create a beautifully worded goal that ticks five boxes.
The point is to create a shared understanding with the client about:
What matters to them, where they're starting, what we're going to work toward, and how we'll know whether things are changing.
That's a much more useful way to think about goal setting.
And it's particularly valuable when we're working with clients who have pain, injuries, or other challenges that make progress less predictable.
Want to learn more?
SMART Goal Setting is the focus of this month's Pilates workshop inside the Pilates Teachers Community.
We'll go beyond simply explaining the SMART acronym and look at how to turn real client goals into measurable outcomes that can actually be used in your teaching.
You'll learn how to:
Identify meaningful, client-centered goals
Turn broad goals into SMART goals
Establish a useful baseline
Decide what is worth measuring
Identify capacities that may influence a client's goal
Use goals to support your programming decisions
Reassess and evaluate change
If you'd like ongoing Pilates Continuing Education that connects research with the realities of teaching Pilates, you can join the Pilates Teachers Community and try it free for 2 weeks!
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