Tracking Your Fitness Journey

Working out is a great way to help keep your body healthy, and it can also be a great way to keep your mental health strong. Getting into a workout routine can be a lot of work when you have kids - just working out for a few minutes everyday can be a real accomplishment. Ideally you have got something going consistently, but even if you don’t, you’re getting as many workouts in a week that you can.

While working out is a great first step to getting healthier and stronger, you should also work on making progress to getting better at whatever you’re doing. If you’re running, you are trying to run faster (or farther). If you’re lifting weights, you’re trying to lift more weight. If you’re doing yoga, you’re trying to get more flexible or maintain your poses longer. Whatever you’re doing, you should be trying to make progress.

In order to make progress, you need to know how you did the last time you did the exercise. You can’t run faster if you don’t know how fast you ran last time. You can’t lift more weights if you don’t know how much weight you lifted last time. If you’re not tracking how you’re performing in your exercises, then you don’t know if you’re getting better or not. You need to track your progress.

You don’t need to write every detail about everything you do. However, you should keep a basic log of what you’re doing in your workout and how you’re doing. For weights, ideally you are writing down all of the lifts that you’re doing and the weight you’re doing. For other exercises, you’re writing how long you went, and at what pace or resistance. This will help you to see how you’re progressing or regressing.

If you’re progressing, then you’re likely happy. However, if you’re unable to progress, then you need to figure out why. Are you trying to lose weight, so you’re eating less food and that’s affecting your workouts? Or are you not sleeping enough? Are you not able to progress because you’re not trying to - perhaps you’re just going through the motions in your workouts. By recording progress, you’re going to be able to know if you’re getting better or not.

You may not get better every single workout. Once you’ve been working out long enough, you’ll come to a point where progress in your workouts will be minor. However, over the course of multiple workouts, you should expect to see some progress. Without records of how you did 4 workouts ago, you’re not going to be able to tell if you’ve actually progressed or not. Keep your logs organized in a way that works for you.

Keeping logs of progress over multiple months and years is interesting to look over to see how you’ve progressed over a long period of time. While you may not see improvement between workouts, looking how you’ve gotten better or worse in the course of a year can show you how much you’ve actually progressed or if you need to work harder.

Track your workouts and your progress either in a phone app or in a regular notebook. Know how much, if any, you’ve improved, and strive to always do better.