Are You Tracking Your Progress?

Tracking can be used in many different ways to reach your fitness goals. Whether it be to lose weight, gain weight, or get stronger, tracking is an essential tool to see if you’re hitting your daily, weekly, and monthly goals.

Recording Workouts

One example that you can incorporate the next time you hit the gym is writing down your workouts each time you train. This means recording the sets, reps, and weight used for each exercise in that session.

Doing this does several things:

1. Accountability: It holds you accountable the next time you work out. It’s hard to ignore the numbers staring you in the face from your last workout. This way, you don’t have to try and remember what you did last time; you have a record of it.

2. Progressive Overload: It pushes you to either add more weight or do more reps than last time. This is known as progressive overload, which is the basis for getting stronger or more muscular. Adding just a little bit more each week, usually 2-5lbs or doing more reps, helps. When a weight becomes too easy to perform at 15+ reps, it’s time to increase the weight. Over time, you will begin to see the progress you make, which can be very motivating.

Tracking Weight and Caloric Intake

Other examples include tracking your body weight or your caloric intake:

Body Weight Tracking: This can be a useful tool to tell if you're making weight loss progress. Since our weight fluctuates daily, by weighing and keeping a record of your daily weight, you will be able to tell if you're moving the scale, whether it be up or down. It is recommended to weigh yourself first thing in the morning upon waking. This will be your true body weight.

Calorie Tracking: Sometimes needed to see if you are really eating enough or too much, depending on your fitness goals.

Conclusion

To wrap everything up, if you are really trying to make progress in the gym or outside of it, it is important to keep a measure of certain things to reach your goals. Without knowing which way we are moving, we're just going blindly, not sure if we're headed in the right direction.