Setting specific goals is more effective than a vague pledge to exercise more. Goals should be realistic enough to be achievable, but challenging enough to be effective. Breaking your longer-term goals into milestones and tracking efforts can also help. Perhaps your long-term goal is to walk 12,000 steps a day and you currently walk 3,000 steps. You may want to increase the number of daily steps by 1,000 each week. So next week your goal is 4,000 steps each day, the following week it is 5,000 steps and so on.
