Take the guesswork out of progressing toward your fitness goal, and start measuring and reporting. According to Pearson’s Law: “When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported back, the rate of improvement increases.”
If you want to see results, you cannot rely on hard work and luck alone; you must consider all the factors that affect your progress. For fitness, health and weight management goals, this means programming, intensity, consistency, recovery and nutritional intake. Yes, for best results, measuring calories “in” and calories “out” will be a major part of the data.
The Danger of Just Guessing
Many people start toward their fitness and health goals with excitement. However, when you do not track progress and assume you are doing well, you create blind spots and waste time doing things that are not working. After months of spinning your wheels with minimal results and too few data points, it is too easy to make excuses and quit. Here are some strategies to help you track progress:
Write Down Results
Don’t just say or think you are progressing. Measure it, and write it down. Being intentional about measuring progress or lack of progress is feedback. Nothing is good or bad about the feedback; it is information that tells you whether you are on the right track. Maybe you are just missing one piece of the puzzle.
You can use a notebook, a calendar on a clipboard, a computer spreadsheet or a fitness app. It is up to you, but nothing about it requires high-tech equipment if you are not inclined. This feedback needs to include accurate data on:
- How long you exercised
- How much you ate at each meal (including snacks and extra calories in drinks)
- How well you slept each night
Don’t forget those extra calories in drinks you consume. Often, those are the mystery calories “in” that we forget when we do not track them all. These are critical pieces of information for how well you will perform on a fitness and health goal.
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Results Yield Answers
When you review your notebook, you find answers to why you performed so well today. Perhaps you were fueled with good food, had a great night’s sleep and did not miss any workouts the prior week. The same holds true for poor performance. You can attribute the poor performance to not eating before exercise or to a few nights of poor sleep earlier in the week. When you have data to help you understand good or bad performance, it takes the emotion out of the equation, and you are more likely to continue pushing toward your goals. Then, next week, you are smarter and work intentionally to improve on what you slacked on the week before.
Accountability (Part Two of Pearson’s Law)
The second part of Pearson’s Law is where the real magic happens. Pearson said that if you report the numbers from the previous week, you will improve faster. Reporting means sharing results with someone else. This could be a friend, a workout partner, a spouse or someone who shares their progress on social media and soon has a community of people wishing you to lose 100 pounds in a year.
Regardless of how you report it, it is simply accountability. Accountability makes you try harder, as you do not want to tell someone you skipped working toward your goal for no reason. You also get encouragement and advice, as a coach or a mentor can help you fix mistakes before they even happen.
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Long-Term Strategy
You do not need to be a scientist like Karl Pearson for this to work for your long-term goals. A longtime workout partner at my gym and I have a weekly weigh-in on Friday mornings after a workout. Both of us have seen progress each week since we started this weekly ritual. At first, it was a weight loss goal. Once that was achieved, it is now maintained with more fitness performance goals to report each week. We have found that you cannot see optimal results without stress mitigation, rest/recovery and nutrition also being monitored. At the end of the week, we weigh in, share notes from the notebook, then just discuss what is new in our world. This check-in has been one of the healthiest things I have done for myself in the last 20 years.
Pearson’s Law helps us be intentionally grounded in today, not worrying about the past or guessing about the future. Take time to measure your progress with something as simple as a daily weight measurement; write down the results and report them each week. You will be amazed at how much faster you will see improvements. Check out more ideas at the Military.com Fitness Section for training, weight loss, goal setting, and much more.
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