If you want to be healthier, if you want to feel livelier than before, it’s time to break out of your sedentary lifestyle. Of course, deciding it’s the right moment to make a change and become a former couch potato is only the first step.
Equally important as getting your body to move is to effectively keep track of your progress. Yes, monitoring periodically your results has to become an integral part of your lifestyle-changing process in order to successfully accomplish your fitness goals. Here’s how tracking can help you:
Higher Chances of Reaching Fitness Goals
Setting goals in general is fundamental. According to research, goal-setting has the power to change the way your brain functions and increase your odds of being successful.
Then, moving on to the next phase, you’ll need to set goals that are clear and achievable. For instance, if you wish to be more physically active, instead of saying “My objective is to walk more” set a clear, measurable target such as “I want to walk 10,000 steps on a daily basis”. This is a basic, but fundamental step that will help you determine which is the suitable method to effectively track your physical progress.
If you’ve set a definite goal, then you’ve passed the first level. Next you need to keep track of how you’re doing in your quest to reach that goal. This part of the process is extremely important because, without it, you can’t really know if your exercise plan is leading anywhere. Without proper tracking you can’t actually tell if you’re on the right path or not. How are you supposed to know if you’re advancing and improving your overall health if you don’t know where you’re coming from and where you’re heading?
Boost in Confidence and Motivation
Monitoring your progress does give you a sense of direction and helps you make the necessary adjustments to your daily activity. But in addition to that, it also works on a psychological level and has a major positive impact on your confidence and motivation.
Once you’ll start constantly measuring your results and you’ll begin noticing the advancement from day one, you’ll most surely become more self-reliant. At the same time, when you’ll browse through your logs, see the stats and realize you’re getting closer and closer to the finish line, you’ll definitely feel highly motivated and focused to keep going.
The direct association between fitness tracking and motivation has been thoroughly analyzed by scientists. Findings indicate that visualizing successful fitness data can help us gain more and more motivation and become even more efficient.
Get a Sense of Accomplishment
Reaching a specific goal will provide a much-needed sense of accomplishment. No matter if you walked over 10k steps in a given day, lost 11 pounds in a month or ran your first marathon, having reached that target will most surely make you feel good about yourself. Gaining that sense of achievement will automatically lead to an improvement in your overall wellbeing and quality of life. According to a study, achieving your goals is deeply correlated with life satisfaction.
How Can an Activity Tracker App Help You
In case you wish to properly track your progress you can’t truly rely on the the way you feel, on memorizing how many times you’ve exercised or on other subjective factors. No, in order to know exactly if you’re advancing and what specific areas require improvement, you need to use an adequate tool like a fitness tracker app.
Why resort to an app to monitor fitness progress? Well, first off because it’s something near at hand which anyone can use. All you need is your phone, which you normally carry with you anywhere you go, and you can start quantifying your daily activity. No need to invest in an expensive gadget that does the same thing. It would be just an extra worry to remember to charge it every time and bring it with you when you want to exercise.
Another real value of an activity tracking app resides in its array of features. You can automatically record and quantify the number of steps taken, the distance walked or ran, the time you spent being active or the calories burned. In addition to that, these apps let you set personal goals for various metrics and grant you access to your activity on a monthly, weekly, daily and even hourly basis. You can quickly see how active you’ve been and even share your progress with friends and followers.
Conclusion
Every time you measure your physical activity, you gain insight into where you are now, where you’ve been in the beginning and how far you’ve got left before reaching your goal. You receive relevant data you can easily use in your advantage to build up your confidence and remain driven all throughout the fitness journey.
