How are you measuring progress?

How are you measuring progress?

In this blog, I am going to be discussing why it is important to measure any kind of progress. It is often a big motivator to keep you pushing on. If you was honest with yourself, do you measure week to week how you are progressing?

So why is itimportant?

Lets take measuring your weight for instance. If you were to measure every month or randomly. How would you know for certain what is working and what is not? (Remember this is an example, it is probably recommended someone weigh themselves every week at the same time/day).

So keeping track, helps you look back of the day or week and understand what you did to get to your current state. This can map out what you may need to do more/less of; exercise, meal or sleeping.

Here's a list of what I recommend you should measure progress and why

1. Scales

 Unless you are finding out your calorie intake to see if you are gaining or losing weight I would advise you to weigh every week in the morning at the same time. Relate it back to what you have done activity/diet/sleep.

2. Tape measure for body composition

 This should be done based for body fat or muscle mass calculations. Best to track this every other week as different training programs can work better for goals in losing or gaining inches. Keep it simple with measuring middle of biceps, chest, waist, hip, middle of thighs and middle calves. If you are after fat loss this is another string to your bow at tracking results

3. Sleep 

Very important to relate sleep to recovery and stress. These can limit progress so getting the required amount needs to be tracked with restless sleeping. Sleeprate app is great to help you track sleep. This should be done daily. You should be getting 7-9 hours every night.

4. Food diary 

You need to measure the way you eat, to the structure of your day(meal timing). Having a food diary helps find patterns in your eating habits. Myfitnesspal app is a great way to track your food and start to understand where the hidden calories are. This again should be done daily, it will also begin to look at how much food in calories you are actually eating.

6. Resting heart rate

This should be top as health is so important before you begin any fitness goal. So making sure your resting heart rate is in the average range will help you see how healthy you are (60-100BPM). You should track this weekly so you can see improvements. You can use Fitbit watches, mobile apps or even your finger on a pulse to track.

7. Strength and stamina

There are a number of ways to track performance when exercising. A simple way is just noticing how you are improving on daily activity (less high breathing) Other options can be by logging your workouts; simply write down the difficulty and how much you did. It is also good to look back and see progress.

8. Body fat sites

We have the final way that will give you clear separation from your body fat to your muscle mass. Measuring your body fat sites can help you understand where stubborn fat is not moving. There is the approach of the electrical machines (Tanita), I find them useful, however there can be differences to results based on water intake. You can use the old fashion approach of calipers, which will can give you the more consistent approach. Follow this link to assess your body fat 

Summary

The biggest gauge of progress is how you feel and look. Certain measuring protocols are beneficial for certain times, however they can tell a different story to how you actually feel. Meaning you may not have lost any weight this week, but your confidence has increased.

Measure any progress that is related to you.

Have a great day.