Introduction

If you're serious about your fitness journey and you've started going to the gym, the most important thing you can do is to figure out what it is you want to achieve.

That is, set a goal for yourself and put a deadline on it. Make sure you're going to the gym for a reason that's quantifiable and measurable, because otherwise, you'll show up there and you don't know what you're doing in the gym or why.

In this article, I'm going to discuss why I find it essential to track gym progress... as it's all related to achieving your fitness goals.

Why should I track my progress at the gym?

If you're serious about your fitness journey, then you need to have an end goal that you are working towards.

Without a goal, you risk showing up at the gym one day and not feeling like doing any workout. Every exercise will start to look pointless, and you get more and more bored in the gym. After all, what's so fun about lifting weights anyway?

Especially if you just arrived at the gym after a long day of work… all you really want, actually, is to just go home and eat, watch some TV, and unwind before going to bed so you can sleep and repeat the rat race the next day.

To prevent getting bored at the gym, you need to have something to look forward to.

You need to have a goal... you need to have something you want to achieve -with some effort- with fitness and the gym.

So, the answer to why you should track your progress is actually quite simple.

This allows you to hold yourself accountable for the results you achieve (or don't achieve).

As simple as that sounds, it's wise to keep some nuances related to this answer in mind, as I’ll discuss below.

Break your long-term goal into smaller short-term goals

The most important nuance is that if you have a somewhat ambitious fitness goal, you usually feel like that goal is far away in terms of time and the commitment it requires. That 'end goal' is usually the long-term goal, but the end goal can often be split into several smaller goals.

Achieving these smaller goals often requires less time and less effort. For example, suppose your end goal takes one whole year, but you split it into 4 smaller goals that you each want to achieve within 3 months. This means you only need 3 months per goal to accomplish it.

By breaking down your end goal into smaller goals that take less time to achieve, you ensure that you create a positive feedback loop for yourself. Every time you reach a smaller goal, you can cross that goal off in your mind. This really has a positive effect on your motivation and morale, making your workouts more exciting.

But how do you know whether you are getting closer to your goal or not? In other words, how do you know if you are making progress? Are you progressing too quickly, or is your progression too slow? Are you standing still in terms of progress, or worse, are you going backward?

If you want to answer these questions, you need to be able to tell where exactly in your fitness journey you are. And how do you know where you are standing?

Exactly, you guessed it... by keeping track of your progress!

As I mentioned previously, your end goal is usually far away, but you can often break it down into several smaller goals.

To track and view your progress, you must then keep track of parameters that relate to your goal. The attentive reader is now wondering whether the parameters should relate to the distant end goal or to the smaller goals that make up the end goal. The answer to this question can be found below.

Should you keep track of your long-term or short-term goals?

Most of the time, you should focus on tracking your progress related to the smaller goals (these are the goals that together constitute your more significant, long-term goal).

Of course, you also keep track of your global progress, which indicates how far you are from your end goal, but the most efficient option is to focus on tracking your progress with regard to the smaller goals. Let's call the former macro goals and the latter micro goals.

Macro goals

The parameters you track for your macro goals are often different from the parameters you track for your micro goals.

Because the macro goal(s) relates to your distant end goal, you often need help to correctly check whether you are making too fast, too slow, or even no progress. This makes it more difficult to adjust your fitness plan where necessary. After all, what do you have to adjust if you need to know whether you are 'on track'?

Micro goals

On the other hand, tracking your micro goals makes it much easier to understand and analyze your progress.

You can more often receive feedback from your own progress (after all, you are going to track it, so you will be able to view your own figures) and reflect on how far you’ve come.

This makes it possible to get more strict and adjust your plan where necessary because you will more easily see in which areas you are making good progress and in which areas progress is lagging.

Who should track their progress at the gym?

I'll be short and very clear on this question:

It doesn't matter if you're terribly out of shape and what to start exercising again or if you're an advanced lifter looking to compete in bodybuilding: no matter what your experience in the gym is, you will benefit from tracking your progress if you aren't tracking it already.

Conclusion

So, should you track your progress at the gym?

I'd say you definitely should, because the data you collect provides a lot of feedback on how you're doing and whether you're advancing towards your goals.

Another extremely valuable reason why you should track your progress, is that whenever you check out your results and compare them to the results of the past, you'll see that you have actually advanced in whatever it is you want to advance in.

Just the sight of your progress in the data (whether that's visual data like progress photos or numerical data like your weight loss in pounds or strength increase in maximum weight lifted) will serve as a tremendous boost for your motivation.

And once you see those results you've achieved, your gym journey becomes an addiction.

You'll end up going more consistently to the gym, you'll be more serious about your workouts and nutrition, and therefore, you'll achieve even better results!

Hence, always track your gym progress!

So what do you think about tracking your progress at the gym? Do you already track your progress, and if so, what is your reason to do so? Also, how do you track your progress, and what exactly do you track? Feel free to let me know!