How many times have you set new health goals at the turn of a new year, only to abandon them prematurely? Perhaps, you’ve tried to monitor your calorie intake or improve your strength but always fall short. With 2022 still in its early stages, you’ve probably repackaged your old goals, hoping to reach them. But monitoring those goals will play a crucial role in determining your ability to achieve them while serving as a great motivational tool. With that in mind, here are some of the best ways to track your health and fitness goals.
Narrow down your goals
The first thing you need to do is narrow down your goals to make them measurable. For instance, if your goal is to lose 50 pounds by the end of the year, you can narrow it down to losing about 5 pounds each month. Use the S.M.A.R.T. module to create specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound health goals to make them easy to track. It also helps to create an extra incentive by rewarding yourself whenever you meet any of your goals, as this will give you an extra boost of encouragement to keep going.
Create a plan for achieving those goals
After setting and narrowing down your goals, you want to identify the best path or strategy to achieve them. You can achieve this through adequate planning. Your plan should include how best to break down your goals into smaller, achievable objectives. Once this is done, find out how best or what steps you need to take to reach those smaller goals. For example, if you want to reduce your calorie intake, decide what foods you need to avoid, what products to cross out from your grocery list, and what menu will best suit you.
Decide on what you want to track
You should create about three to four important metrics of what you want to track at the end of each day, week, or month. Of course, this will be guided by what you included in your S.M.A.R.T. goals. But these key metrics are what you’ll use to measure your progress in the long term. That means you need to have a clear idea of what standards you’re looking for or benchmarks you’re targeting to help you identify what to use as your key metrics. Here’s an example. If your goal is to improve your strength by the end of the year, you should ask yourself what are strength standards? What signs indicate you’re making progress or otherwise?
Here are a few ideas that can help you determine your key metrics – your weight, gym sessions, number of reps, running distance covered, sleep hours, how many veggies you ate in a week, how much water you drank, and so on.
Stay disciplined
It’s not going to be easy, but you need to always remind yourself why reaching your goal is important to your health. This way, you can stay disciplined and motivated enough to remain committed to achieving your goals.
