Tracking your progress can give you a birdseye view of all your efforts. Not only will you see your progress, but you may also see early indicators of trouble, which will let you adjust yourself sooner rather than later. As a result, you keep moving in the right direction. In fact, you may reach your goals faster. You may even learn what works and doesn’t work. You may also create rules and guidelines to help you achieve future goals more quickly.
Unfortunately, you can’t remember everything related to your goals. So, you’ll need to track yourself to know if you’re making progress. However, tracking your progress can be overwhelming, especially if you don’t know how to start or how to do it. Thankfully, it can be easy and practical by following three simple rules.
Rule #1 – Track the Basics
Today’s technology can collect a plethora of data about you. Specifically to your health, a wealth of information is available, such as sleep, HRV, SpO2, VO2 max, and more. However, you may not need that data to reach your fitness goals.
For example, if you want to get more sleep, you may track how long you slept and when you went to bed. However, how long you were in each sleep stage or your respiratory rate may seem important. Although it may be interesting to see those things over time, they may not be necessary to achieve your goal. Everything beyond the basics is interesting but not required.
Rule #2 – Focus on Trends, Not Data Points
A data point alone isn’t helpful. In fact, those who don’t track themselves could become frustrated just because of one result. For example, if you’re trying to lose weight and you weigh yourself, you may become frustrated if your weight is the same or just a little bit different than the last time you weighed yourself. You probably can’t remember what your weight was beyond that, so you judge your progress based on what the scale says.
If you were tracking your progress, you are more likely to look at how far you’ve come from the beginning to see how much progress you’ve made. As a result, you may help keep yourself motivated because you can see a trend in your progress.
Rule #3 – Be Consistent
For tracking to be effective, you must record your efforts whenever you do something related to your goals, such as weighing yourself or exercising. You won’t have a complete picture unless you track your data consistently.
Tracking your progress doesn’t take much effort, but recording the data is an extra step. However, you can improve your consistency by using an app, smart scale, and fitness tracker to gather that data automatically whenever you exercise or weigh yourself. Although a smart scale and fitness tracker will collect a plethora of data, not everything is related to your goals. So, remember rule #1 and focus on what’s essential for your success. Everything else is just interesting to look at.
What Should You Track?
There is such a thing as too much data. In fact, too much data can make it hard to make a well-informed decision because it can be interpreted in different ways. That’s why tracking data related to your goal is essential.
For example, you may want to improve your fitness and endurance by walking. Therefore, every time you exercise (rule #3), you should track the date, time of day, and how long and far you walk (rule #1). When you have enough workouts, you should see from the trends (rule #2) how much progress you’re making.
Another example of what to track relates to losing weight. Tracking the date and time you weigh yourself and how much you weigh is essential (rule #3). However, you may want to know why your weight fluctuates (rule #2). Therefore, you also track what you eat and how many calories you consume to give you a complete picture (rule #1).
Regardless of what you track and why you’re tracking it, it would be best if you keep an open mind. As you progress towards your goal, changing what you’re tracking is okay and may be necessary. However, don’t worry about the data you haven’t collected. Focus on what you have.
The Takeaway
You can’t remember everything related to your goals. So, tracking yourself is the best way to monitor your progress and give you a birds-eye view of all your efforts. However, there is a lot of data you can collect. Therefore, you can follow three rules to track your effort effectively. If you track only the data you need, focus on the trends, and consistently record your data, you will increase your chances of success and have all the information you need to make well-informed decisions related to your goals.
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.
