5 Tips for Tracking Your Health Goals

When you want to improve your health, setting goals is a great way to track your progress and make sure that you’re continuing to move toward the end results you really want. However, for many people, tracking those goals–and how you’re working on them–is incredibly challenging. Research shows, however, that tracking progress can have a substantial impact on your results. Are you ready to start tracking your fitness goals and see what you can accomplish? Keep these tips in mind.

1. Start with Realistic Goals (And Break Them Down)

If you want to make the most of your health and fitness journey, start with attainable goals. If you’ve never run before, starting with a goal of running a marathon could quickly leave you frustrated! Aiming toward a 5K, on the other hand, could feel much more reasonable and achievable.

Once you have set that achievable goal, break it down into smaller pieces so that you can more easily track progress over time. If you’re striving toward that 5K, aim for your first mile, first mile and a half, and so on, until you’ve worked up to your bigger goals.

2. Follow people who inspire you and train like the professionals 

It’s important to follow the people who inspire you so that you can keep yourself motivated at all times. A lot of people fail to sustain their fitness goals and efforts with everything that goes on in day-to-day life. Making your fitness regime into a habit takes time and motivation.

Training like the professionals, like marathon expert Kevin Morgan of Pittsford, NY, can help you achieve the health goals you have set for yourself, even if some of them feel like a distant dream right now. Want to be able to run a marathon by the end of the year? Training like the professionals will certainly get you there.

3. Celebrate the Small Victories Along the Way

Health journeys can be long ones. Weight isn’t lost overnight, and new fitness goals aren’t achieved with a single exercise session. As you track your progress, make sure you’re celebrating the small victories along the way! If your goal is losing 20 pounds, you can celebrate when you’ve lost 5 or 10–major milestones on that path to greater health and fitness. If your goal is to lift more weight, celebrate each time you add on a plate. Those small celebrations will help give you the extra push you need to continue.

4. Provide Rewards That Don’t Shatter Your Goals

When you’re on a health and fitness journey, it’s often tempting to reward yourself with “cheats” also known as things that do not fit your fitness goals, but that you’ve been missing along the journey. Don’t give in to that urge! Instead, reward yourself in ways that encourage you to continue with your new health and fitness routine. For example, consider:

• New running shoes
• New exercise clothes
• A new kitchen gadget that will help you fix healthy meals
• A reward from your non-food wishlist, like a favorite collectible

Setting rewards that fit your goals will help keep you on track in your health and fitness journey.

5. Track the Right Metrics

There are a lot of data points you can track on your health and fitness journey. Not all of them, however, are as helpful as you think. Take, for example, your fitness tracker. Most of them focus on how many steps you’ve walked each day–but that may not be an accurate measure of success when your workout for the day was a bike ride or swimming session.

Likewise, if you’re aiming to get healthier, weight loss is just one metric that will help you determine your success–and it may not be the most important one. Tracking inches lost, for example, may actually provide more information than just weight loss alone, especially if you’re lifting weights or toning.

As you consider your fitness goals, make sure they include a real measurement of what you hope to accomplish–and don’t focus too heavily on the things that don’t matter as much to you in the long run.

6. Document Your Progress

When you’re on a fitness journey, it can be difficult to remember where you started. Furthermore, you may find it difficult to remember how long early progress took, especially as you push toward harder goals. Keep a fitness journal, take progress photos, or find a strategy for documenting your journey that works for you. his is something that fitness experts like Kevin Morgan definitely recommend, and it can be truly motivating not just for you, but for others too. 

Get Started with Your New Health Goals Today

Setting new health goals is a great first step. Now, it’s time to start making progress. With these tips and strategies, you can keep track of your progress toward your health goals and see just what you are able to accomplish–and reap the benefits of a healthier, fitter body.

By: Katherine Robinson, a writer for HOTWORX