Tracking the progress of your workouts is essential for achieving fitness success, no matter what sports or activities your regime entails. Whether you use a treadmill daily, do a spin class, or lift weights at a gym, you can effectively track your numbers in a way that helps meet fitness goals in a smarter, quicker way. Are you tired of setting goals and then giving up midway? Read the following reasons for tracking the progress of goals along the way.
Stay Motivated and Committed
What keeps you motivated is not just your end goal or result – what keeps you regularly attending a workout or fitness group is tracking and realizing your progress along the way. It is easy if you have set a far-reaching goal to think that not much is changing on a day-to-day basis at the gym, when in fact it may be.
The only way you can know for sure is to track numbers each visit and then look at the difference from week to week. When you see a marked difference between each week is when you feel like each time you hit the gym matters and that your goal is already materializing.
When you feel like each visit makes a difference, it motivates you to keep coming, be consistent, and work harder. Motivation means a commitment to yourself, and commitment means you will meet your fitness goals. The confidence gained by tracking and realizing your progress so far may even help you look forward to working out.
Improve and Refine Your Programming
Being aware of how each workout is going and your rate of success in making your fitness goals can help you best refine and modify your current workout regime. By tracking your results, you can identify your weakest spots that have the biggest room for improvement and also identify where you may have plateaued. You can modify your workout accordingly to scale back or forward depending on how you are on target with your final goals. Doing so leads to better overall workout efficiency and conservation of your time and effort. Having a trainer really helps when it is time to do an assessment or periodic evaluation of where you are at in achieving your fitness goals, but if you do not have a trainer or coach, keeping track of your progress yourself is essential so you don’t make more work for yourself than you have to or waste your precious time.
Set Better Goals and Accomplish Them
You should track fitness progress for clear, attainable goals that are measurable. By being realistic and honest with yourself about what you are truly trying to achieve, you can set goals at the beginning of a new fitness regime that can be measured per workout in terms of progress. By tracking progress each time, you can also tell if your original goal is unrealistic or unattainable.
Tracking progress forces you to be aware of the end goal and be accountable to yourself. It also makes you more likely to reach and exceed your goal when you set the right goal in the first place. Being accountable to realistic goals strengthens your focus and self-discipline to accomplish those goals.
Tracking fitness progress is right for all levels of activity and all fitness levels. Even if you have been working out at a gym for years or have had the same fitness routine at home for a while, it is never too late to track progress, refine your goals, and wind up exceeding them! Whether you are trying to lose fat, stay fit, and/or gain muscle, you can achieve reasonable goals by taking care of yourself first.
Eat right, sleep right, and take special care to track how you are progressing each workout.
Author bio:
Hannah Stevens is a new freelance writer from North Carolina. When she’s not on her laptop writing, she finds inspiration with her two dogs on a good kayak day on the lake.
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