Skip to main content

How to measure your progress

By
In the past, we used to only diet to lose weight so it was fairly straight forward, all we needed was basic scales to track our progress. These days we all know that just dieting isn’t enough, we also need to exercise to look and feel good, but exercise means muscle and muscle is heavy. The muscle mass is the gains you want but it makes scales all that more irrelevant when you want to see just how well you are doing.
There are several ways to track your progress depending on your goals and how precise you want to be. If you only diet, you will not only lose weight, you will lose fat and muscle (which can have serious health consequences later on in life), and in this case you can use basic scales that only show you your general weight. If you exercise as well you will need to get more creative.
Take weekly or daily photographs. It’s not just a way to see how you are progressing but a way to stay motivated. Seeing yourself as you are can be a good reality check – after all, we all think “we are ok” up until the moment when we strip down. Every morning or every week depending on how often you want to do it, strip down to your underwear and take a full body shot – from front and side. Don’t be tempted to suck your stomach in or take a better picture, you need to see how things really are. Then compare older pictures to new ones to see your progress.
Use a measuring tape. Instead of judging by your weight, use your body measurement as a guide. Every two weeks measure your arms, your chest, waist and butt similar to how you take measurement for your clothes – and note the numbers. If you are trying to get leaner, the numbers should go down and if you are trying to gain weight, the numbers should go up. Alternatively, and this is not as precise, judge by your clothes, if you need new clothes – you are on the right track. 
Use scales that measure your body fat %. Unlike the dumb scales that only tell you how much you weigh, body fat measuring scales will tell you how much of your weight is fat and how much of it is muscle, bone and water. These scales are not expensive and they can paint you a very definite picture of how thing stand right now. Keep in mind, though, that your water contents change during the day so it’ll help if you weigh yourself at the same time in the day you always do – preferably in the morning before breakfast. 
Although it can help to pay attention to how you are doing, tracking your exact progress can sometimes make fitness mentally harder than it should be, especially if you have a long way to go and your progress is slow. Sometimes it just helps to stop thinking about the progress and just do the thing. Show up every single day and work at it then only occasionally look back and see just how far you’ve come. If you are someone who finds strength in seeing the numbers rising or dropping the measuring tape or the BF% scales are the way to go. Tracking progress using photographs is a good middle ground. 
Whatever you pick always remember that everything you do, every positive choice, every training session – these things are never lost, erased or not counted in, it all adds up. As long as you keep going and stay consistent with your training you will get fit and stay fit. Concentrating on the work instead of the numbers will also help you integrate fitness into your lifestyle so even when you are not tracking your progress, you are still progressing.

Comments

Post a Comment

Ezoic

Popular posts from this blog

How to make any workout feel easier

By
How you feel during training is not always a reflection of how fit you are. If you know just how to manage it and use a variety of mental tricks you don’t just get to feel better than you would otherwise, you will be performing better, doing more and work out harder. Fitness is, mostly, inside your head. It’s first of all a mental battle you need to win in order to make yourself train, make yourself train on the level you need to, and then to continue doing it time and time again. Once you do get yourself to exercise, there are a few tricks you can use to make the whole process easier on yourself: Don’t think about how hard it is. We often concentrate too much on how difficult and challenging training is, magnifying it in our head, all the while struggling more and more with the load. The more you think about yourself not being able to cope, the harder it feels. Essentially this is the pre-game pep-talk technique, applied to your training routine: Keep telling yourself that what you ar...
Post a Comment
Read more

Wenger and Arsenal stuck together in defeat

By
COMMENT: Wednesday's 3-1 defeat to Monaco has left the Frenchman on the brink of his most embarrassing European exit and the sense is of a coach who has reached his ceiling By Liam Twomey As the dust settled on another   Arsenal   humiliation and criticism poured in from all sides, the most damning words of all flowed from   Arsene Wenger . He spoke of “suicidal” defending, a collective loss of nerve and the heart ruling the head before touching on a favourite theme. “Mentally we were not ready or sharp enough to get into this game,” he admitted. “We paid for it.”   Mentality is something Wenger talks about a lot, in victory and defeat. Nor is it idle talk – renowned French psychologist Jacques Crevoisier has regularly been employed to work with Arsenal players in recent years, and in 2010 he subjected the entire squad to a psychometric test designed to measure all the mental qualities required of an elite athlete. Nicklas Bendtner famously scored 10 out of nine for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fitness and Hydration

By
Nearly 80% of our body is made up of water at birth. When something in our biological make up takes up so much volume the chances are it plays a critical role in our neurobiology which also means it affects every aspect of our fitness. By the time we reach maturity water levels have stabilized to 65% for adult males and 55% for adult females which suggests that water continues to be critical throughout our lives, so the question is how much should we drink in order to be fit and healthy?  Depending on where you look and who you ask the answers are going to be either up to eight glasses a day or less than eight glasses a day. Those who say we don’t drink enough also cite evidence that water helps our metabolism stay active, boosts our brain power and helps athletic performance while the critics claim that too much water makes us stupid, it can seriously depletes sodium levels in our bloodstream impairing athletic performance and can, in extreme cases, also kill us.  Both camps ...
Post a Comment
Read more