Tracking Your Progress To Stay Motivated

Tracking your progress is so important for improving your health and fitness. Unfortunately, many people don’t track their progress in the most effective way.

They might keep track of their weight, their body fat percentage, their blood pressure, or other results. That can be ok, but it can also sometimes backfire. If your numbers aren’t changing the way you want, you might get discouraged and lose motivation.

There’s a better way to track your progress that helps improve your motivation and set yourself up for long-term success.

Progress Tracking: Behaviors Not Results

The first and most important step is to shift your mindset away from chasing results, and instead to focus on your goal behaviors.

You can’t necessarily control the results you get. Your body composition, your health metrics, your athletic and exercise performance are affected by your genetics, your environment, and a lot of other things that aren’t totally in your control.

What you can control is your choices and actions, and that’s where you should be putting your effort.

You need to make healthy choices consistently, day after day, week after week, year after year to get the amazing benefits of exercise and healthy eating.

Creating a system that motivates you to be consistent in achieving those daily goals will help you get those long-term benefits. That's why, instead of tracking your results, you should track your behaviors.

I want to give you a simple way to do that.

There’s a well-known story about a young comedian who asked Jerry Seinfeld for his advice about how to become successful.

Seinfeld said that to become a better comedian you need to write better jokes, and to write better jokes you need to write every day.

He had a very specific tip for achieving the goal of writing every day. He told that young comedian to get a big wall calendar and hang it in a place where he would see it often.

Every day that he achieved the goal of writing jokes, he should take a marker and put a big X over that day on the calendar. Pretty soon, there would be a chain of Xs in a row. Then, simply try not to break the chain.

Notice that Seinfeld didn’t say you have to write “good” jokes. He didn’t even say you have to write a lot of them. He just said you have to write every day. I’m not a comedian but I guess that, like everything else, the more you practice writing jokes, the better you get at it.

It’s exactly the same with achieving a health and fitness goal – it’s all about taking consistent action and building skills through those actions.

How well you perform doesn’t matter as much as you think.

Let’s say your goal is to jog every day. It doesn’t matter if it’s not a “good” jog. You might go slower than you were planning. Maybe you run out of energy halfway through and walk the rest of the way.

It still counts! You put on your sneakers and got out there, so you achieved your goal that day!

If you do that day after day, week after week, you will become a better jogger. Your physical and mental health will improve, and you’ll be building important skills like resilience, persistence, and the ability to overcome obstacles.

Once you’ve formed a consistent habit and built a foundation of fitness, then you can build on it by applying progressions to your workout or doing more advanced techniques like interval training.

How To Track Behavior Progress

I like using a visual progress system for tracking your goal behaviors, just like Seinfeld suggested. It makes it easy to see whether you’re on track and it can become a powerful motivator for consistency.

One thing I disagree with Jerry Seinfeld about is that I think it’s ok to break your streak every once in a while. You’re human, and no one can keep up with their goals perfectly all the time.

The key is to get right back on track the next day. A day off is ok, but two days in a row is the start of a pattern. If you let it go longer than that, pretty soon you’ll be “off” your health and fitness program.

I wrote more about this in my article: Never Miss Twice. If you do break your streak, do everything in your power to start a new one the following day.

Tips For Setting Up Your Progress Tracking System

Be very clear about your habit goals

If you’re going to track your fitness progress, you need to be really clear about what you’re tracking. There should be no doubt as to whether you achieved your daily goal. If there is, then your goal is not set up well enough.

For example, a goal of “walking more” isn’t clear and specific enough. What does “more” mean?

Instead it should be something like “take a 10-minute walk outside each day”.

To learn how to set effective goals, download my FREE Goal-Setting Guide. This eBook walks you step-by-step through the process of identifying your deep and meaningful motivation, setting specific goals, and creating action plans to achieve them.

Keep your tracker in a place where you can see it often

It’s important that you always keep your goals and your progress at the front of your mind. I like the wall calendar for this reason, but you could use a notebook, a website, or an app.

I recommend also spending some time discovering your deep and meaningful motivation. Why do you want to get fitter or healthier?

Write that down on your calendar or in your notebook, so you’re reminded of what you’re working so hard for.

Focus on making positive choices consistently, and you’ll be on your way to a healthy life!

Good luck, and if you need help, feel free to contact me. All my personal training programs come with goal-setting and motivation support.