Are You Tracking Your Fitness Progress?

Have you ever found yourself in the gym with zero recollection of the weights, sets, and reps you used last time? If you have, this is your sign to start writing down and tracking your lifts each and every workout. While tracking every single set and rep may seem pointless, and rather annoying at first, consistently tracking your progress has a myriad of benefits and can actually help you achieve your fitness goals faster and more reliably!

Strap in and let’s have a look at what fitness tracking looks like.

What should I keep track of?

There is so much you can track when it comes to health and fitness that it can be too overwhelming to begin. This is where having clear goals helps you understand what to track and what to measure on a consistent basis. For example, if you’re just looking to get stronger, then tracking your body weight is not a huge priority. However, if you’re looking to lose weight, body weight tracking is essential.

For the sake of simplicity, let’s narrow down the various fitness goals into three separate buckets; losing weight, building muscle, and athletic performance goals. Losing weight and building muscle are self-explanatory, but athletic performance can be subjective. For this article, athletic performance essentially encapsulates any and all fitness goals related to getting stronger (lifting), faster (running), or better at some athletic skill (jumping).

Losing Weight

Let’s start with the goal of losing weight. The key metric for losing weight is, of course, your average body weight from week-to-week. However, there are other metrics you can keep track of to stay accountable and on track.

First of all, body weight measurements are best taken every morning around the same time and then averaged from week to week to provide a general trajectory of progress. We average the weight to account for daily fluctuations such as dehydration, indigestion, or other anomalies.

Additionally, we can track our daily step count to ensure we’re staying active. This can help you understand why some weeks you may be losing more weight than others, and could alleviate some of the frustration of a plateau week.

Finally, we recommend that you keep track of your food or calorie intake. If you don’t know what you’re eating, it’s very hard to consistently lose weight. Now you don’t have to measure out every gram of food, but having a general idea of what your daily diet looks like goes a long way.

Building Muscle

Next up let’s look at what metrics to track and measure while building muscle. Building muscle has two main components, progressive overload in the gym, and sufficient protein intake. Some also say that a large caloric surplus is required, but you simply need to eat about 250 calories (or more) over your maintenance and you’re good to go in most cases. Generally, we know that to build muscle, your body requires protein, energy (calories), and a stimulus that promotes growth.

So let’s start with tracking protein. This may sound dreadful to some, but in reality it’s quite simple. When it comes to building muscle you ideally want to shoot for 0.7-1.0 grams of protein per pound of body weight. So if you’re a 150 pound person, you’ll want to aim for 105-150 grams of protein per day! The easiest way to keep track of this is through a mobile app like MyFitnessPal or Cronometer. These apps have nutritional information on nearly any food available in the world. Simply log your meals to ensure you’re hitting your protein goals and you’re well on your way to building muscle!

As for the energy component, a large caloric surplus is not strictly necessary for building muscle and size, which means that body weight measurements are not as beneficial to track compared to the weight loss fitness goal. This is because for the vast majority of people, muscle is built incredibly slowly and large amounts of short term weight gain is usually attributed to fat gains. It might, however, be beneficial to keep track of your weight to ensure you’re not gaining too much fat too quickly!

Finally, your muscles require a form of stimulus to continue growing in size and strength. One of the best ways to optimize for muscle growth is through progressive overload. We are working on an extensive article on progressive overload, but to summarize here, you want to continuously challenge the muscles with harder exercise week after week. Either through increased weight, increased reps, or increased time-under-tension (TUT). And while many of you may already know this, you’re probably not keeping track of exactly what you’re lifting every single workout, which is leaving valuable gains on the table!

The best way to track your week-over-week progress is through a notebook, an app, or even a simple spreadsheet. We recommend keeping track of the exercises you perform, the weights used, the reps and sets performed, reps in reserve (RIR), and perceived rate of exertion (RPE). Now all of these don’t need to improve each time, but as long as you get a little bit better every week, you can ensure muscle is being built. An additional benefit is that you can also look back and see that the weight has plateaued for several weeks which could indicate the need for change in your workout, diet, or recovery process.

Performance Training

Lastly, let’s look at performance training and what metrics to keep track. Performance training might actually be the simplest to track and measure for most athletes. For example, a runner only needs to keep track of his running pace, mile time, or overall running time. Additionally weight and caloric intake can be tracked, but this may only be necessary for elite athletes or the very dedicated weekend warrior.

Another example is the powerlifter. Their main concern (we are generalizing here) is lifting heavier weights to prepare for their lifting meet or competition where they will attempt a personal best on their exercise(s) of choice. For powerlifters it is also important to keep track of their weight, as this could fluctuate and move them between weight classes, which could be detrimental to their success. Again, caloric intake can be tracked, but is not of utmost importance as long as their weight remains where it needs to be.

Finally, you have sports specific athletes. These metrics are all over the place, for soccer players it could be cardiovascular endurance and leg strength. For basketball players it could be vertical jump height. For football players it could be strength metrics and weight. This all depends on your specific sport and what metrics are responsible for your success as an athlete.

Why should I track my progress?

The key benefits of tracking your progress can be summarized into three separate buckets. Consistency, progressive overload, and the road so far. Let’s dive into consistency first.

1. Consistency

When it comes to fitness and health, consistency is the main driver of long term success. Anyone can do a 30 or even 60 day crash diet and lose 10-20 pounds, only to regain the lost weight within a couple of months and be right back where you started. The real success comes from making the right choices over an extended period of time. These daily, or weekly choices slowly shape your mind and body to become more fitness and health oriented, which has long lasting effects way beyond just how you look physically.

The way tracking your progress and metrics supports consistency, is through keeping you accountable as well as showing you exactly what you need to do or accomplish for the remainder of the day, week, or month. Keeping track of your daily step count, for example, could be the difference between being in a caloric deficit or a surplus. If it’s 6pm in the evening, and your daily step goal is 10k, but you’re only at 5k, it might push you out the door for a short walk instead of sitting down to watch that second episode of Criminal Minds.

Over time, these small choices can have a dramatic effect on your health. Think about this, a small 100 calorie deficit per day turns into over 10 pounds of fat loss over the course of a year. Additionally, these decisions reinforce the personal belief that fitness and health are a priority and continually keep you on the right track in the short term!

2. Progressive overload

The second big benefit relates to the progressive overload principle. As I mentioned previously, to build muscle you need to continuously stimulate the muscle with harder exercise. For optimal results, you should aim to get slightly better every single day you workout that specific muscle group. For example, if you’re doing bench press on Monday, every Monday you should aim for a slightly heavier weight, more reps, or increased TUT. Of course you could try to memorize these things from week to week, but as we know all too well, memory isn’t perfect, especially when other life stressors get in the way and our brain gets scattered. The way to combat this and optimize your training is to log everything you do during your workout. This allows you to continually look back at the previous week’s records and try to do better and better every workout!

Now, I do want to provide one caveat here. Don’t simply start lifting to increase the numbers, because this could lead to ego lifting and potential injuries. Your body goes through phases and isn’t necessarily always in peak condition for every workout. If you were 100% recovered, had 9 hours of sleep, and almost zero life stress for last week’s workout it doesn’t mean that you NEED to follow that up the next week. If you’re feeling good and rested, shoot for higher and better. However, if you’re under-recovered, haven’t slept well, or have been having a hard time at work, just do your best and use the previous week as a reference instead. Remember, progress is not always linear, you’ll have good days and bad days, but if the average trajectory is up, you’re doing great!

3. The road so far

Finally, one of our favorite benefits of tracking progress is seeing how far you’ve come. Most fitness fanatics often get stuck on wanting to continually get better, stronger, or bigger; and when we plateau for a couple of weeks or even just a few days, we get discouraged or frustrated. This is where keeping track of your metrics is incredibly important. You can look back several months, or even years, and look at how far you’ve come since you started your fitness journey. If you’re losing weight and are stuck at 180 it’s easy to get frustrated if your goal is 170, but if you just look back and see that only a year or two ago you were 270 pounds, it can relieve some stress and ease your mind!

Another example would be a weight lifter stuck on a 405 pound deadlift for weeks. This can be incredibly irritating and could throw their motivation out of the window if they don’t have the ability to look back and see that only a year ago they were just deadlifting 150 pounds. This may not clear up all frustration, but it can help alleviate some stress and irritation and instead allow you to think of ways to switch up your routine to continue getting stronger!

Now that you know how powerful and helpful tracking your progress can be for long-term health and fitness success, give it a shot and let us know how it went in a couple of months!