Whether you decide to lose weight, start a New Year’s resolution, or want to form a new habit, it takes more than willpower and motivation to reach your goals. In fact, without some signs of progress or improvement, you’re likely to give up. Unfortunately, you may not realize you are progressing since your improvements may be so small that you don’t notice them. Fortunately, you can track your fitness goals to see those improvements.
Tracking Your Fitness Goals
It seems simple enough. Write it down each time you exercise, weigh yourself, or do something related to your fitness goals. Although, writing it down can mean different things. For example, it can be a notepad or a spreadsheet.
However, it’s very easy to track your progress automatically with an app and a fitness tracker, smart scale, or other wearable. Technology makes tracking your weight, exercise, sleep, blood pressure, and many other more advanced metrics such as HRV, SpO2, or ANS easy.
Advantages of Tracking Your Fitness Goals
Fortunately, there are some advantages to tracking your fitness goals. Sometimes, the fact that you’re tracking something is enough to improve your chances of success. Yet, tracking with a purpose gives you an edge. Let’s explore five advantages of how tracking helps you achieve your fitness goals.
Motivation
Tracking your fitness goals can help you stay motivated and focused. There will be hard parts in your journey where you may become frustrated. You may feel like you’re not progressing or that your efforts aren’t getting easier. It’s hard to think of how far you’ve come if you’re in a rut. However, you can easily take a step back, look at your journal, and see all the hard work that has led you to where you are today.
Accountability
Tracking your fitness goals can help you stay accountable and on track by serving as a reminder of what you’re trying to achieve. Also, it can help you stay accountable to yourself and others as you can share your goals with friends and family and ask for their support in helping you reach them.
Improved Performance
Tracking your progress can help you identify areas where you need to improve and help you make adjustments to your routine to maximize your performance. Your fitness journal can show how you respond to your workouts over time. Additionally, you can experiment by trying new activities or working out at different times of the day. As a result, you can optimize your active lifestyle to achieve your best.
Self-awareness
Tracking your progress can help you become more aware of your body and how it responds to different types of exercise. In fact, you may easily see how changing your workout affects you for better or worse. Perhaps your routine makes you tired, affecting your sleep, or you notice a change in your mood. Tracking your fitness goals can help you see patterns when you do certain things. This isn’t easily accomplished if you try to remember everything.
Boost Your Confidence
Tracking your progress can help you feel more confident in reaching your goals. When you can see your entire journey from the beginning, it can help you feel good about your efforts. Starting something new can be daunting and overwhelming. However, tracking your fitness goals can help reassure you that you can do it.
What If You Don’t Track Your Fitness Goals
If you don’t track your fitness goals, then you won’t have the insight you need to succeed. Furthermore, you won’t be able to look at your progress from a higher level easily. As a result, this makes it harder to see what is working and what isn’t.
If your goal is to lose weight, you may miss the fact that you are losing small amounts of weight over time. Instead, you may become frustrated and give up because the scale isn’t dropping by a pound every week. Another example is that you may miss that your cardiovascular health is improving since your resting heart rate is lower than when you started. However, if you were tracking your progress, you could see these changes in your efforts.
Fortunately, nothing bad happens if you don’t track your fitness goals. However, it may be harder to achieve them.
The Takeaway
Tracking your fitness goals has many advantages. Not only does it provide you with valuable insight into your progress, it can boost your confidence, provide motivation when needed, and keep you on track. Today, it’s very easy to track your progress automatically with an app and a fitness tracker, smart scale, or other wearable. Therefore, getting in the habit of tracking and reviewing your fitness goals regularly can help you achieve them faster.
FitTrend’s mission is to help you along your self-improvement journey, promote an active lifestyle, and help you achieve your goals. Our journal can help you track your workouts, weight, mood, calories, and more. Also, FitTrend allows you to connect supported gadgets to your account to make it easier for you to update your journal automatically. Create your account today and start using FitTrend for free!
Disclaimer: No content on this site should ever be used as a substitute for direct medical advice from your doctor or other qualified clinician.
