It may seem like tough love, but tracking your missed workouts and days when you know you haven’t eaten healthfully can help you reach your workout goals. You can’t measure what you don’t track and if you’ve been working with a training plan and trying to lose weight or gain strength, tracking the days that you made an excuse to miss your workout or binge on fast food can help you reach your goals faster.
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Why tracking your efforts helps you reach your goals.
Tracking your calories in, calories out, and your workouts help to keep you accountable and committed to your results. For some, the satisfaction of crossing off a successful workout or seeing that you’re under your calorie goal for the day is enough motivation to keep moving forward. For others, seeing your efforts and progress in black and white helps to take the mystery out of getting healthier. Whether you prefer pen and paper or a tech-savvy app on your phone for tracking, it’s the act of tracking that makes you accountable to yourself, not the way that you track.
How to track the negatives, as well as the positives.
Missing a workout or having a cheat day isn’t a reason to throw in the towel. If you find that you’re routinely skipping workouts, making excuses, and promising yourself you’ll start again tomorrow, you might benefit from keeping track of those days you didn’t hit your goals.
Count your calories even on cheat days or cheat meals. Whether you planned a cheat day or an unexpected event kept you from your healthy eating goals, make sure the bad calories get tracked, too. Holding yourself accountable on the tough days can help you better understand why you’re not seeing results, and might prevent you from overeating if you know you have to log it.
Write down your reason. Whether you missed a few workouts in a row or found yourself eating more than intended, it’s important to make note of your excuses. Being honest with yourself is the cornerstone of accountability. Often, we tend to lie to ourselves, convincing ourselves that we’re eating healthy foods and portions and exercising consistently when that’s not the case. Writing down your reasons forces you to be truthful to yourself, and accountable for your progress and setbacks.
Look for patterns. If you see the same excuses popping up on a regular basis, you can catch a bad habit before it takes root and start to change your behavior.You can see how unexpected events keep you from your workout and adjust your schedule accordingly. Maybe a morning workout will help you stay on track? Maybe you’re not managing stress at work and would benefit from a noon workout? When you see patterns, you can act to prevent the patterns from keeping you from your goals.
Do you track the bad days as well as the good days? How and what do you track to hit your goals?
