How best to track your own progress and keep progressing

With your plan now hopefully in place for the new year and a focus on the ever changing conditions of life altering it, you should now be ready to start your training and diet regime. A massively important part of this is to make sure you can reflect and review upon your own efforts and try to ensure that you are making the kind of progress you want and need. So what are the best ways to do this? How do you evaluate how well you’ve done with your pain? We’ll take a look at the best ways possible to ensure you’re tracking your progress through the New Year and how they will help you too.

Keep a training diary

This might sound like something that is time consuming or like something that you don’t want to complete but the importance of tracking your training days cannot be underestimated. Try to record your lifts and your times in a small notebook for immediate reflection and comparison to where you’ve come from. This is a great way to see times and weights in a simple and concise way. It also allows you to see small improvements where they crop up during a typical training regime and will throw up some surprises where you may have not realised you are performing better. If it’s a new heaviest weight, write it down. If it’s a new personal best time, write it down. Seeing your results in a straight forward recording like this can be a great way to see mentally how you’ve done over the last few weeks and gives your training purpose and dedication.

Keep a photo journal

A lot of people will be more interested in how their body is transforming in the New Year more so than how they are performing. If this is your way preferred way to calculate success, then keeping a photographic record of your efforts is a fantastic way to track how your training is progressing your body goals. Take a picture a week for two months initially to see where you are on your own journey. Be sure to capture front, back and side views and don’t be afraid to leave comments on each picture as to what you like and what you could maybe improve. This will help you to narrow down exactly the areas you’d like to continue working on or maybe the areas you could do with improving down the next weeks.

Use your gut

A lot of times people will ignore their body feelings and press on with the same way of training and developing because they refuse to adapt as “he and she” are doing it, then it must work. If you don’t feel like something is working, then it probably isn’t. If you don’t feel like you’re performing better, then you probably aren’t. Take the feeling deep inside and trust that you are probably due a change if things aren’t working for you. Most times you don’t feel right after taking that new supplement or don’t feel like a particular exercise has had an effect, then it’s time to stop repeating the same pattern and keep working on new ideas and new ways to keep your body guessing and working at its best. Just because you planned something in and it looks good on paper it doesn’t make it right for you. Don’t forget that your personal plan is ALWAYS there to refresh and change on a constant basis. The evolution of yourself is always a changing idea so be sure to embrace change and never become stagnant if you feel inside that you need to change something.

Research new ideas

Always be on the lookout for new tools and ways to ensure that you are recording your progress properly. There’s so many opinions and views on what makes for a good plan and how best to stick to it through a year so make sure you are constantly no only working on your health or fitness ideas but also your mental ability to shift with life too. There will be things out there than can help you massively and you just might not know it, so research online tools and other fitness fanatics and look what there is to find that could possibly help you along the journey. Use the free tools and ideas and always shift your ways of thinking to discover helpful insights that can boost your own efforts and keep you on track down the next twelve months.

There’s so many ways to ensure you’re always keeping on top of your yearly plan and there’ll always be a time when it changes for you without you knowing. You have to remain flexible and positive about the change in order to work at your best. Think outside the box when you’re tracking fitness goals, life ideas and health targets because you may just come across something that changes your entire outlook on what you’re trying to achieve somewhere along the line.