So you've got some goals that you want to achieve - great!
But how do you know if you're progressing towards them and on track?
Data.
That's what.
If you don't have data to understand your progression towards your goal, when do you know you're getting close?
It's like trying to get to a new city without any directions.
You might eventually end up there, but with directions (or data) you'll know where you are, how far you've got to go and how you're progressing.
So what data can you use to track progress?
It really depends on your goal but below are 5 great things that you can use if weight loss or muscle gain is your goal.
1) Steps
Most smartphones have a built in activity tracker and a lot of people have some form smartwatch/fitbit. Understanding an estimate of how many steps you've taken in a day is a great way of monitoring how active you are. Is it 100% accurate? Nope. But that's not a major concern if you're using the same device to track your activity. Also, don't stress if you miss out on tracking for a day or two because the battery on your fitbit died. We're looking for long term, sustainable progress. Not an overnight success.
2) Training
If you don't track you're training, start. You'll be able to understand how much you've improved over time and not just since your last session. You can see if you're getting faster, running further, getting stronger etc. Rather than just guessing how you've progressed. Also by tracking your training, you can begin to periodise it. This is just another way of saying that you can effectively plan your training and the levels of volume load you're going to progress with before reducing it to deload.
3) Progress photos
This is something you can keep completely private and it's not necessary to share with the world. Photos are a great indication of how exercise and nutrition changes your body. Again, another great reference to look back on and see how you've changed over long periods of time. We're amazing at remembering how we were yesterday but not 3 months ago. Also, who doesn't like a transformation Tuesday that shocks themselves of how much progress they've made over time through consistency?!
4) Weight
I've done a whole post on this before about how your weight fluctuates and how to objectively track it over time. The short version is take a daily weigh in, average it across a week and track it over time. Weight change isn't linear so you'll be able to see the general trend over time. By having these averages of weight, we can then correlate them to the rest of the data we have and see if we need to change any of the other variables to progress. E.g. if our weight has stayed stable for a while, we could look at adapting the amount of steps we aim for in a day to help support further weight loss.
5) Calories
I saved this for last as it's not for everyone. But understanding your calorie intake or at least the calorie value of foods you eat regularly can put you in a good place to understand how much you're consuming. There are so many calorie dense foods which aren't very filling and a lot of times people don't realise this until they start paying attention to food labels and portion sizes. Take coconut oil for example. Talked about by a lot of people as being the healthy oil you should cook with. But you could easily save yourself 100-200 Kcals by switching to some form of spray oil. If you're not tracking any of the above at the moment, start off with one or two.
I'm not great when it comes to things like this as I often want to take on more than I can handle. It usually results in me trying to juggle too many things and rather than getting good at them all, I only progress a little in each and give up as clearly they haven't improved anything!...
Nail down one or two for a couple weeks and then add another.
Set yourself up to succeed by not trying to achieve everything at once.
Thanks for reading. If you’ve got any questions or want any support with anything, let me know!