Over the years in my articles, I’ve recommended recording your health and fitness baselines and plotting your success. Some of the best indicators of your progress are simple; how you feel and how your clothes fit. You can keep it simple and do measurements (body fat, inches, weight) monthly, or with the rise of technology, you can go deeper. Today I’ll discuss how you can use technology to your advantage and beware of taking it too far.

If you’ve been working out regularly, you know by now, that once you move past your initial three months, you need a recharge; something to keep you motivated and improving. So, how do you keep yourself on top of your game?

What are you using for your health tracking? There are tons of apps out there: nutrition, water, fitness, meditation etc…The first thing you should decide is; what NEEDS tracking. Are you lacking in the sleep department? Exercise consistency?

Beware

There are two opposing forces to consider while tracking your progress; too little and too much. These days technology has taken off, perhaps too far. It’s been said that if you were too look from an aerial view, you’d see humans being led around by their techy-devices. So, is your device holding you back or making you better?

I’d like to give you some advice about how to use your health & fitness apps., and/or wearables, to your advantage. It’s not only tracking that is important, but making sure you are using the information to ENHANCE your results.

There are two ways your tracking can go; push you for greatness or hold you back.

At Fit It In Fitness we use an effort tracking system, Myzone Effort Stream. This allows us to rate our effort during workouts, how often we exercise, and heart rate specifics. This tool is great for leveling the playing field being that it tracks not only calories, but also your workout effort, and heart rate. The point is to make sure that day in and day out, you are getting better and working harder. Each workout, you should strive to meet or beat your last results. There comes a time when you need to reassess your baseline measures; recovery time, max heart rate, effort points. Simply wearing your monitor doesn’t boost your results, setting goals based on your results, does! Without this tracker, or something similar, you don’t know what to shoot for.

There is however, a risk of holding yourself back with technology. You could either under analyze or over analyze your progress. Looking too deep into the data could be stunting your results. Once you’ve found your levels of effort, do you try to meet them or beat them?

If you don’t use the information you gather from workout to workout, you won’t know what to change to keep improving. On the flip side, if you are too engrossed in your data, you might also hold yourself back from hitting new limits. For example, while working out at FII, you will see your screen go “red” if you are working 90 percent-max heart rate. If someone were to instantly stop because they saw “red” they could be holding themselves back from setting a personal record. To avoid becoming complacent, I suggest you do one workout each week without looking at the numbers during your session. Review your stats after, and ask yourself: “did I work to my full potential?” “Could I have worked harder?” “Did I reset my maximum heart rate?”

Shoot for greatness

This technique of checking in (later) can give you the opportunity to test your effort and set a new standard for yourself. Sometimes we hold ourselves back by trying to simply match our last effort. Let go of technology once a week and see if you are improving.

The goals of this article are to entice you to track your progress and make sure you are using it to improve your overall performance. If you aren’t using an application or “wearable” to hold yourself accountable, you should. There are endless amounts of programs you can use on your phone as well as heart rate and effort monitors. When used properly, they can boost your motivation and effort.

However you choose to track, be sure you are always giving 100 percent. Sometimes we can get caught up in the numbers and hold ourselves back. Shoot for greatness, don’t settle!

Fit It In runs the fourth Sunday of the month. Danielle Tetreault is a personal trainer and the owner of Fit It In Fitness and is always available for a free fitness assessment. She can be reached at fititinpt@hotmail.com, or visit her website at www.fititintraining.com.

Newsletter