How are you measuring your fitness goals?

This is the number one mistake I see in the gym today from not only newer gym goers but also the more experienced as well. Not recording their training session or food intake, no matter what your goal is; fitness, strength, weight loss, muscle gain or maintenance. The two things that are going to influence that result is your food and your exercise. How often do you sit, take a minute and review your last 9 weeks of training and food and the outcome you got from that? Or do you find yourself saying I feel good or I feel bad? Without any understanding of why or how you got that way.

I often see people go through fantastic training periods where they smash all their goals and everything seems so consistent and achievable and they feel great about it. Then I see them go through periods where nothing seems to work and they didn't hit any of their goals and it feels almost impossible to fit their fitness goals into their already busy life. The problem isn’t that they have good periods of training and bad periods of training, the problem is they have no information to fall back on to tell them why or what to focus on to make things change or stay in the great period of training.

Imagine applying this type of thinking to any other area of your life and expecting a consistent result.

You don’t just leave for work in the morning when it feels good you have a consistent measurable tool that you use for a consistent outcome, it's called the time.

You don’t just spend the amount of money you feel like throughout the week you have a measurable tool to help you get the consistent outcome you want, it's called a budget.

My point is you already have lots of these things built into your life already I'm just asking you to treat your food and exercise the same way if you want a consistent outcome use a measurable tool to help you do that. Now that could be fancy like an app on your phone or it could be simple like a daily step counter or a note book to record your training sessions and food in. However intense you choose to go with it, just do something, add one piece of measurable information to your weekly food and exercise routine then review it whenever your feeling a certain way about your training or food.

Feel great about your training lately? Awesome, go find out why so you can repeat it and when it eventually goes away you know how to get it back.

Feel terrible about your food? Great, go find out why so you can start to make a change and when you eventually start to get better with it you know what the problem was so as to not have it happen again.

This may seem overly simple but this principle works in every other area of our lives. Some far more complicated then health and fitness. I truly believe we make food and exercise harder then it has to be on ourselves by not understanding what we do or don’t do and then why. Not understanding ourselves and our routine just leaves us with guilt and feeling guilty that we didn’t do something or scared to try again out of fear of failure or not being perfect straight away. And those two things stop more people from being where they want to be with health and fitness then almost anything else.