Ep 21: 21 Ways to Measure Progress and Crush Your Fitness Goals
How do you know when you’ve reached your goal?
If you’re trying to lose 20 pounds, do you just instinctively change your eating behaviors and eventually magically arrive at your target weight? If you’re trying to build muscle, do you go to the gym without a program and randomly hit up different weights and machines, rep ranges, rest periods, and muscle groups?
Chances are, when you’re committed to a goal, you come up with a plan and then measure progress along the way. Otherwise, how do you “close the loop” between desire and outcome?
In this episode, we dive into 21 specific ways to measure progress toward your health and fitness goals, categorized into six areas: biometrics, biofeedback, nutrition, physical activity, behaviors, and self-awareness. We want to select the right measures for the job so we have clear, objective feedback that tells us whether we’re on track.
With these tools at your disposal, and strategies to use them that I’ll talk about, you can crush any fitness goal with the certainty that you know how and when to adjust course.
RELATED LINKS
MacroFactor diet sidekick (use discount code WITSANDWEIGHTS)
🎙️ ABOUT THE SHOW
At Wits & Weights, we help you shred fat, build strength, feel energized, and project confidence in your career and relationships without excessive dieting, cardio, or food restrictions.
👉 Just go to witsandweights.com/coaching to connect with me.
👥 To join our Facebook community for live training, free guides, free challenges, and more, just click here.
🙋♀️ HOW TO ASK A QUESTION FOR THE SHOW
👉 If you have any questions, just click here.
👨💻 HOSTED BY
Philip Pape of Wits & Weights (Instagram 👉 @witsandweights)
👏 ENJOY THE SHOW?
Let me know by leaving a review in Apple Podcasts
👉 Apply for 1-on-1 coaching: witsandweights.com/coaching
Transcript
This podcast was transcribed automatically, so please forgive any errors or typos.
[00:00:00] Philip Pape: Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast, for busy professionals who want to get strong and healthy with strength training and a sustainable diet. I’m your host, Philip Pape, and in each episode, we’ll examine strategies to help you achieve physical self-mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry, and a commitment to consistent lifting and nutrition.
[00:00:31] Welcome to episode 21 of Wits & Weights. Before we get into the details. If you enjoy the show. If you find it valuable educational entertaining, or perhaps it's given you some aha moments, please consider submitting a five star review for the podcast to make sure others can find the show and benefit from the content as you have.
[00:00:51] Also, if you know someone who could better understand some of the nutritional and training gems, we share to help them accomplish their goals, tell them about the podcast. You can just take a screenshot of the episode, tag me at what's in weights and post it to your story. Now I wanted to share a five star review from one of our listeners quote.
[00:01:12] I started listening to wits and weights last week, and I've binged all the episodes in the last few days. Thank you for taking the time to create and produce this show. I'm not a beginner lifter I've been lifting for about 10 years with both a strength and conditioning coach and a nutrition coach. I didn't know if I'd learned anything by listening and I could not have been more wrong.
[00:01:31] I learned so much here. I had a mindset. I don't need to know this stuff. That's what I pay my coach for. Wow. I feel like I've missed out. I align with a lot of the habits and values that Philip discusses on the show. Great content end quote. Uh, I really love to hear reviews like that, and I would love to hear more if you enjoy the show.
[00:01:51] So, um, get out there and spread the word now onto the show. How do you know when you've reached your. If you're trying to lose 20 pounds, do you just instinctively change your eating behaviors and eventually magically arrive at your target weight? If you're trying to build muscle, do you go to the gym without a program and randomly hit up different weights and machines, rep ranges, rest periods and muscle groups.
[00:02:17] Chances are when you're committed to a goal, you come up with a plan and then measure progress along the way. Otherwise, how do you close the loop between desire and outcome? In this episode, we dive into 21. Yes, 21 specific ways to measure progress toward your health and fitness goals. And I categorize them into six areas.
[00:02:42] Biometrics. Biofeedback nutrition, physical activity behaviors, and self-awareness we want to select the right measures for the job. So we have clear objective feedback that tells us whether we're on track with these tools at your disposal and strategies to use them that I'll talk about. You can crush any fitness goal with the certainty that you know, how and when to adjust course.
[00:03:09] Let's start with biometrics. Number one. Body weight, body weight is one of the easiest to measure metrics on the entire list. Everyone's familiar with it just about everyone has a scale and if not, they're easy to get access to and they can tell you pretty quickly what kind of trend you're experiencing toward fat loss or muscle gain if you're training.
[00:03:36] So if you're training and you're losing weight, you're probably losing. More fat and muscle. If you're training and you're gaining weight, you're probably gaining some muscle along with some fat. Now, of course, this all depends on the rate of change. If you're going more aggressively, you might, um, gain more fat or.
[00:03:56] Lose more muscle, for example, but body weight is a very easy metric to measure. Now I've talked about this on the program before I like to weigh daily and I like to weigh daily because when you do that, number one, it becomes a habit. Something you really don't think about too much. Number two, it becomes a data point where it's, it's not an emotional thing anymore.
[00:04:16] It's. A number that changes every day. And number three, you start to get comfortable with the fluctuations that happen from day to day, especially when you're gaining or losing at a rapid clip. You might see wild fluctuations from day to day. And when you get used to the fact that that's happening and realize that it's the average over time, that really indicates what's happening to your body composition and your overall, you know, weight towards your goal.
[00:04:44] Uh, it, it just kind of, um, Object, you know, makes it an objective measure and a data point rather than an emotional one. So I like body weight. That's number one. Um, we can use it for a lot of reasons. Uh, when we're measuring progress, number two body measurements. Now this encompasses a lot of different things.
[00:05:04] The first and most, I guess, useful and accessible would be circumference measurements. And these would be things like your waste. Your neck, your hips, your chest, your biceps, your thighs, perhaps your calves, perhaps your shoulders. Now you can, you can measure all of these things if you'd like, if you don't mind the sliding convenience of it, and you want as much data as you can, but let's break it down to the minimum and then kind of an optimal middle ground in my opinion.
[00:05:40] So the minimum would be measuring your neck. And waste if you're a male and then also hips, if you're a female and that is because those measurements are used for the Navy body fat calculation method, it's a way to calculate body fat just with tape measurements, without the need for cappers, any special scans, these special skins.
[00:06:05] I, I wouldn't trust the absolute number very much, but the trend in the number is highly reliable. So if you are a female and you measure your neck and your waist and your hips, you plug it into a calculator for Navy, the Navy body fat method. and you come up with, you know, 35% body fat. Well, you might in reality be 30% or 38%.
[00:06:29] Uh, but then you do it again next week, the week after that, the week after that. And meanwhile, you're training and you're, you're watching your diet and it goes from 35 to 34.5 to 34 33. Well, that trend is a pretty good indication that you are losing body fat. So that's why I like those circumference measurements.
[00:06:49] Additionally, if you want a middle ground for additional measurements, I would include chest. Biceps and thighs, those are good data points for, um, body composition, change and muscle growth. Now keep in mind that everybody gains and loses fat in different areas, but generally if you're waste, circumference is coming down, you're losing fat, but you know, again, some people may, it may take longer to see it in that spot.
[00:07:17] So having a few different measurements, um, helps you triangulate. What's going. now some other body measurements as part of this, uh, this second metric biometric would be, uh, skin fold measurements using calibers. And you can get the, the simple ones online that you do at home. They come with a little chart and a guide on how to use them.
[00:07:39] And there are all sorts of caliber measurements. There's a single measurement. There's three site, five site, seven site measurements where you pinch. At various areas of your body, you know, your abdomen, your chest, your thigh, et cetera. And then you plug it in a calculator and it tells you what your body fat is.
[00:07:56] I would say that this has roughly the same, uh, accuracy as the Navy method and similar reliability when it comes to following the trend. So again, you wouldn't rely on the number, you would rely on the trend. Um, so if you wanna try that, that's an, that's an extra tool. Um, then there are body scans, which are less accessible, more expensive, more inconvenient.
[00:08:19] And in my opinion, you, you really don't get a lot more for all of those costs, unless you're say an athlete or your performance focused and you just want every data point you could possibly think of. And those would be body scans like DXA. And bod pod, and I've done the bod pod a few times. It's, it's not that hard.
[00:08:37] You, you know, you, you wear, um, skintight clothes and you jump in this egg shaped machine for a minute. Um, and they give you the data on your body composition, you know, fat, free mass fat mass. But again, if you look at the, uh, if you look at the error percentages from the literature, they're really not much better than.
[00:08:58] Skinfold or circumference measurements. So you, you choose a, and then the last part of body measurements would be these, uh, body scan or impedance devices, I should say. Um, I would avoid those. Those are highly inaccurate. Generally. The ones that use only the feet or only the hands where you hold the, the device with the electrodes or the metal like metal plates or metal contacts or the ones that are built into, uh, bathroom scales.
[00:09:27] I wouldn't rely on those. I have heard that the trend on those can also be something you can use, but I would rather use circumference measurements or skin fold CAS. All right. So that's number two, the third and final biometric. I would use is progress photos. Um, and I call this a biometric because it's a, it's sort of an objective data point, uh, measuring your body via imagery.
[00:09:52] Right? So taking progress photos, you could do this in a couple ways. The way I suggest is simply a neutral, relaxed hands to the side position, take one from the. Take one from the back and take one from the side full body, um, take them wearing, you know, briefs or briefs, underwear, um, yoga pants, bras, things like that.
[00:10:15] So you can, you can see the, the parts of skin that are relevant to you for tracking over time. The second way to do it is to do poses, right? So if you're more focused on muscular development and you wanna do some body building style poses, you can throw those in. the key is to be consistent each time you do them under the same lighting, the same time of day.
[00:10:36] Um, usually preferably in the morning when the same time you'd weigh yourself, you know, after going to the bathroom, um, while not wearing very much clothing before you've eaten anything at a minimum, get, take these monthly, I would say, um, if you don't mind take them every week, sometimes you'll see more change than, than others.
[00:10:52] And it's nice to have that. Uh, but this actually gives you a couple things first. It can motivate you as you see your body changing as you're transforming over time. It is just self-motivating to see that, uh, we all like to feel good and to look good. And it's a perfectly valid, uh, driver of our goals.
[00:11:14] The other aspect is for muscular development. If you are working on, um, your muscular size, your mass, your symmetry, any of those things, even if you're not a bodybuilder, you just want to make sure certain areas are coming along and. you can take photos to assess the weak spots. All right. Now we get into biofeedback and I actually have seven of the ways to measure progress categorized under biofeedback.
[00:11:41] The first one. So this is number four. Overall is stress stress by some measures is potentially the biggest indicator of. Your performance of your recovery, of your ability to grow of your ability to meet your goals. Uh, it affects your diet, affects your hunger. It affects all the other biofeedback we're going to talk about.
[00:12:04] I'm not gonna get into hormones like cortisol, which is the stress hormone. But when I talk about stress here, I'm not necessarily referring to acute positive stressors like training. You know, when you train in the gym, that is a stressor I'm referring to the chronic stress that comes from. A lack of sleep or having to work long hours or having situations in your life that just make it difficult to cope with everything going on because your body's resources and your mental resources are being stretched so thin by biofeedback here in terms of progress.
[00:12:40] Understanding and being aware of your stress, your chronic stress on a day to day basis can be a great tool to say, Hmm, is there something in my life that, that needs to change? Is there something that I need to eliminate reduce? Do I need to evaluate my priorities? And if I cannot change certain things, if I absolutely can't change them, right.
[00:13:01] How do I cope with that stress? Can I. Breathing techniques, meditation, yoga going for walks, right? There's a lot of different ways to cope with stress, um, dancing, you know, fun hobbies. Now I would argue that there are a lot of things we think we can't change, but in reality, we can, like, we can say that, Hey, I have my job.
[00:13:22] It is what it is. It pays really well. It's got really long hours. It's super stressful, but you know, I, I, I can't change my. but really ask yourself if you, if you had a gun to your head and this was the only way to reduce stress, could you find an alternative that, that I'm just putting that out. Um, as something to think about, always reassessing those things in your life and their priorities.
[00:13:46] So that's stress, that's a, an excellent form of biofeedback. The next one, number five is sleep, both quantity and quality, quantity of sleep. Is important. If you're only getting five hours of sleep a night, that right there is just gonna be a drain on the rest of your day and your recovery and your energy, everything, uh, it affects your hormones.
[00:14:05] It affects your hunger, but let's say you're getting the requisite seven or eight hours of sleep, maybe even six and a half seven. The question is, is the sleep quality optimal sleep quality, meaning. You sleep through the night, right? You don't get up multiple times. You fall asleep fairly quickly. Not instantly, because that could be, that could be a negative sign right there, but you know, fairly quickly do you feel well rested when you get up?
[00:14:30] So I have a, I have an entire episode about sleep that came out, uh, not long ago. You can look it up in the, the feed. But sleep is a form of biofeedback that like stress, cascades and affects so many other things that we do. And for lots and lots of people addressing sleep, all of a sudden magically, uh, makes lots of other ills diminish or disappear.
[00:14:58] I put it near the top of this list because of its importance. And there are a lot of ways to improve sleep quality, sleep hygiene, using a pre-bed sleep. all of that's covered in the other. Okay. Number six is energy and energy's kind of a nebulous term, but it basically refers to your, get up and go your ability to be motivated and feel like you want to be productive and do things throughout the day.
[00:15:25] We're really talking about just your, your baseline versus your, um, current, current energy. So if you normally can make it through the afternoon and all of a sudden you are just feeling wiped. By the afternoon, that could be a sign of something else. It could be a sign of poor sleep. It could be a sign of overtraining.
[00:15:43] It could be a sign of lack of recovery. It could be a sign of being under fed all of these things interplay. And the reason I'm listing them out independently is because each one of them can be assessed objectively. So energy's a good one. The next one is number seven and that is mood. All right. So energy and mood, they kind of go hand in hand for some people and mood, uh, seems kind of subjective, but again, it's relative to you.
[00:16:10] If you notice a change in your mood, if all of a sudden you're a lot more grumpy or more hangry, there, there could be. An issue related to your energy or your sleep. It could be hormonal, uh, changes in hormones can absolutely affect mood and hormones are intricately tied with your nutrition, with your training and potentially some other, other, other line issues and medical things.
[00:16:35] But, you know, if we're, if we rule those out. Then we're really just talking about the other factors in your, in your life, regarding your nutrition training, et cetera, and how they, um, can affect your mood and hormones. All right. Number eight, hunger. All right. I love hunger because depending on your, in a fat loss phase or a muscle gain phase, you could experience hunger in both cases, but for different reasons.
[00:16:59] So if you're losing fat, if you're in a deficit, you're going to experience hunger even. Unless it's a very quick, you know, three or four week diet or something, but generally you're going to experience more and more hunger simply because you're depriving in your body of the calories. It needs to remain in balance, remain at homeostasis, you're adapting downward and you're eating less food.
[00:17:20] So now all of a sudden you're telling your body, there's an absence of nutrition available. Anybody saying, I want more food, so I'm gonna send you a stronger signal that I need more. That hunger is a good signal because it can tell you maybe, Hey, I've gone a little too far into my cut, or maybe I need to eat more fruits and vegetables or drink more water.
[00:17:42] All of the things that could reduce the symptoms of hunger, but allow me to stay on my plan. I need to eat more, um, less calorie, dense foods, you know, more. Foods have more nutrition, but less but fewer calories. I need to change the timing of my meals. Maybe I need to reserve some calories for right before bed.
[00:18:01] Maybe I need to eat before my workout, rather than going fasted or vice versa. All of these things, hunger can tell you. And then another interesting thing is hunger on the way up. So if you run a building phase and one of my clients recently talked about this and I've experienced it myself. I, I, I do occasionally right now because I'm on a building phase and that is that you.
[00:18:21] Sometimes you start cranking up the calories, you know, I'm up to 2,600, then twenty nine hundred and thirty two hundred. I'm up to 3,500 calories and you're still getting hungry. Throughout the day, and it's such a weird phenomenon, but you know, lots of things are changing. You're probably eating a lot more carbs.
[00:18:36] The protein's more or less the same, if not even slightly less than when you were in a cut, but you're eating a lot more carbs. You're probably training harder. You're probably more active, right? Your meat is going up. Your TDE is going up. So all of these mess with your hunger signals and your, your hormones generally, I mean, I would say from experience.
[00:18:55] A lot of this will go away or you kind of, um, you know, push through it. But if the hunger is so stark, It surprises you. That is a that's good biofeedback. Uh, you know, maybe something has to change in the types of foods you're eating, you know, similar to when you're in a cut, do you need to eat more for fewer vegetables, more water, right?
[00:19:16] Do you need to space out your food? Are you eating too much? All at once too little, all at once. Hunger's great indicator of biofeedback. All right. Number nine is digestion. Digestion would be things like gas. bloating, you know, just some of these are experienced acutely. For example, if you start taking creatine maybe, or you start, um, taking a new probiotic, uh, but I see a lot with.
[00:19:39] Things like sugar, alcohols, artificial sweeteners, a lot of protein. When you start eating more protein, let's say you were, uh, an 80 gram a day protein eater. And now you're trying to push up to one 50 to get enough protein. Well, all of a sudden you might have digestive distress or maybe you are eating meals that are just.
[00:19:58] A little bit too large all at once. And you wanna space out the meals. Um, so you have fewer calories per meal. Again, all these things are just your body saying, eh, something's a little off. I need to do something here. I need to change what I eat when I eat, how I eat all of those things. Number 10.
[00:20:15] Recovery. So this is the last part of biofeedback. This is related to physical activity, which we'll talk about a little bit later, but the recovery piece of it is a form of biofeedback and by recovery it's things like. How sore am I the next day? How beat up do I feel, you know, are my muscles tight? Uh, do I feel like I'm gonna have trouble?
[00:20:37] You know, I'm gonna have to limp up the stairs. uh, you know, I'm thinking of myself here right after heavy rack poles the next day. Now a lot of these symptoms are perfectly normal and expected. If you're training hard, right? You expect to have a little soreness. Sometimes not always, but sometimes. And you expect to feel kind of beat up, but if it starts to build, if it starts to get where you feel, sluggish, if your legs feel heavy in the gym and not only do they feel heavy, but you are as a result, not performing.
[00:21:11] Okay. And I wanna make that distinction because sometimes you just don't feel great and then you perform fine and you realize it was mainly in your. I'm talking about where you literally start to regress in the gym. So that is a, a sign that you either need an extra rest day, potentially need a deload week.
[00:21:30] Or maybe even rest for a week or longer or a complete change in your programming. Right? If you are trying to do the Texas method as a 55 year old, if you're trying to do a six day a week body building program, that's 90 minutes a day, or if you're trying to do two a days and you're not on steroids, all of these things could be potentially over training you and you will feel it in terms of your lack of recovering your lack of performance in the gym.
[00:21:57] Hey guys. I just wanted to thank you for listening to the podcast. If you find it valuable, you would be doing me a huge favor by sharing it on social media. Just take a screenshot, share it to your Instagram story or Facebook, please tag me so I can personally thank you. And we can talk about what you found helpful and how I can improve again.
[00:22:17] An incredible thank you for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the. That brings us to nutrition. Number 11 is how adherent are you to your diet? So this is a metric in and of itself. And if you track in any way, you know, track versus intuitive or instinctive eating. So if you track in any way, you have a good sense from day to day of whether you are being consistent.
[00:22:48] There's different ways to track, right? There are there's full tracking where you're tracking your calories and all your macros, your protein, fat carbs, and you're tracking against targets. There's tracking where you only track your calories and protein. Maybe you just track your calories or maybe you track something like portions, you track how many portions of protein, fat carbs you have, or maybe you track using photos.
[00:23:10] Whatever it is. You have an objective way to measure from day to day, whether you are in the ballpark of your intended target. The reason you have an intended target is because you have a goal. You have a goal to gain weight, to lose weight or to maintain weight. And this is an input to that process. How many calories you're consuming, right?
[00:23:28] The output being things like weight and body photos and all the other things we talked about. Did you get close to your target every day on average? So that for the week, your weekly average. Where do you want it to be? Uh, it's a simple thing, but we have a lot of, uh, folks who feel okay, I'm, I'm gonna reach my goals, but I don't like to track that is I don't wanna say a losing proposition that works for a lot of people who are in tune with themselves and understand portions and can eat intuitively because they have the experience from past tracking.
[00:24:00] But if you've never tracked and I've talked about this before, it's gonna be very, very hard to objectively stay where you wanna be. And meet your goal. Now, I'm not saying it's impossible. If you go by feel and you eat every day and you eat till you're full, but you're not stuffed. And at the end of the week, you've maintained your.
[00:24:18] And you have a good sense of how you felt all week. And you just repeat that every week then. Yeah. Maybe you can meet your goals. It's just a lack of fidelity. And so diet adherence, consistency and tracking in some shape or form is a helpful way to track. It's a helpful measurement. So that's number 11.
[00:24:36] Number 12 is protein. Now I'm not gonna go through all the macronutrients. I only have one devoted to one macronutrient and that is protein. I would say it is the primary macronutrient for growth for anabolism, as we say, right. For muscle growth or also for anti metabolism. So avoiding a situation where you are losing muscle, especially while you're losing weight.
[00:25:01] In that case, we wanna lose fat. We don't wanna lose muscle. And it's the one macro where you generally keep it consistent, whether you're gaining or losing weight and you adjust the fats and carbs. Most people do not get enough protein. If they're training, if they have a goal for, for body composition or for fat loss, most people do not get enough.
[00:25:22] And by enough, I mean around 0.7 to 1.2 grams per pound of your body weight, or if you're, if you're quite overweight, then it's of your target body weight. So if you're 150 pound person, it's around 150 grams, if you're 300 pounds, but you wanna weigh 200. Then it's 200 grams. The thing with protein is it has so many benefits, right?
[00:25:44] Improves satiety. It's the backbone of muscle building. It's the backbone of muscle preservation. It has a higher thermic effective feeding. So you actually burn more calories eating it, and it helps actually helps displace the other macronutrients. If you prioritize it, meaning from the time you get up and eat breakfast and each feeding and food choice thereafter starts with protein.
[00:26:07] To get to that target evenly distributed throughout the day, more or less, it's going to shape what your meals look like. They're gonna be protein focused protein first, and then you're gonna fill it in with the rest, right? With your veggies and with your starches, with your fats. The point here is, are you tracking your protein?
[00:26:24] Because if you're not, that could be a helpful measurement of your progress. Number 13 fiber. Now fiber's something. I think a lot of folks don't really track it, but if you start tracking it, you might be surprised. I know myself personally, this is one of my small areas, not small, but one of my specific areas that I need to keep working on.
[00:26:47] Okay. And it's because I grew up not eating very many fruits and vegetables, like many of us, and I've graduated over the years, added more and more now tracking fiber will tell you basically what kind of diet you're. The benefits of fiber are many. They help with hunger. They help with digestion. They help with bowel movements, but then also the amount of fiber you're eating tells you how nutritious your diet is in general, because you only get enough fiber from having enough fruits, vegetables, whole grains, the appropriate types of seeds and nuts, et cetera, lot of great foods.
[00:27:25] So they kind of go hand in hand, which is why it's a good metric. The recommendation is generally to consume 14 grams of fiber for every thousand calories you consume. So if you're on a 2000 calorie diet, 28 grams of fiber, and you might be surprised at the fact that you are not getting that amount, if you start tracking it.
[00:27:46] So by logging your food in a tracker like macro factor, You can see every day, oh, I'm only getting 20 grams of fiber. What can I change? Oh, maybe I can start having a banana here and some nuts here, some fruit, some, some more roughage or, or salad here. And then that starts to displace maybe more processed food choices.
[00:28:04] And again, you improve your diet overall and it's easier to meet your goals. It helps things like hunger. So that's fiber fiber is really important. Number 14, this is the last one under Nutri. Would be hydration. I include water under nutrition because it helps with everything else. Getting enough water is so important.
[00:28:24] And again, most people don't get enough. The amount of water you need is roughly half your body weight, plus 15 ounces. So if you weigh 200 pounds, that's about 115 ounces of water, which is almost a gallon of water a day. Now ask yourself, do I get anywhere close to a gallon a day between water, diet, soda, tea, even coffee.
[00:28:45] I know people say, oh, coffee's a diuretic, but it's a net. High hydrator. Alcohol's definitely not on the list. Okay. so don't, don't take it that far, but fruit, this goes back to the previous metric. If you start eating more fruits and vegetables, but especially fruits, you'll get more water in your diet as well.
[00:29:03] All of these things are tied together. So hydration is really important. Ask yourself if you're getting enough water. If you're not sure start tracking it, just to see, and then take half your body weight plus 15 ounces or even more if you're active and try to get that much water every day, that brings us to physical activity.
[00:29:20] Number 15 is steps. Are you tracking your steps? I'm a huge advocate of steps. You know, this, if you've ever heard any of my podcasts, I go Gaga over walking, something that changed for me after I had my back surgery last year, I didn't use to like to walk. I love walking now because I see all the benefits for your resting heart rate for your.
[00:29:42] Metabolism for your mortality for avoiding disease for your joints, for your recovery? Uh, just as a, an enjoyable activity, basically steps are, I would place them up, like in the top five of things to, uh, increase if you were to get onto a solid plan for nutrition and training, because they're the quickest, easiest, one of the most human ways to simply be more active and increase.
[00:30:11] Total daily energy expenditure. If you're not tracking them though, you don't really know if you're getting enough. Once you start tracking, you get a feel for, Hey, this is what 2000 steps is like. This is what 10,000 steps. This is 15,000. You get a feel for it. And then you kind of know where you wanna fall on a daily basis.
[00:30:30] So what I recommend doing is getting some sort of wearable. It can be a very inexpensive one because the speedometer function on most wearables is just fine. Even the heart rate is usually fine. Anything else? I wouldn't trust like calories burned. Totally useless based on what the, the evidence shows, but steps are pretty close.
[00:30:48] So you get a speedometer of some sort, you know, apple watch fit, big Google fit, whatever, and you track your steps and see where you are just naturally. If you're, let's say you're 4,000 steps a day because you have a desk job, you, you maybe pace around a little. You don't really go for a walk. Maybe you work out and that counts towards your steps.
[00:31:06] And now you wanna add 2000 steps. Well, 2000 steps is about a mile. You go for a walk after a meal, you go for a walk after lunch, you go for a walk after dinner and a mile is what? 20 minutes of walking in a reasonable pace. You don't even have to go to briskly. You get a mile that's 2000 steps. You do that a couple times.
[00:31:25] That's 4,000 steps. Now start doing that for several weeks, several months and see what happens in your metabolism. I can almost guarantee that it's going to go up all things. Right. Like if you're in a cut, your metabolism starts going down. Now I'm not talking about the gross change. I'm just talking about the net change.
[00:31:41] So adding more steps in when you're on a cut, for example, should blunt the decline in your metabolism. Um, but in general steps at increase, there's so many benefits of it. Make sure to track it. It's a great measure of physical activity. Number 16 is your training progress. And by this, I mean, do you log your workouts?
[00:32:06] Do you plan for your workouts? Do you write down what movements you're doing? The sets, the reps and the weight on the bar and then do the same movement next. And use more weight or use more reps. Aren't you doing that? Because if you're not doing that, you're missing out on the biggest benefit of strength training and the most effective approach, which is known as progressive overload.
[00:32:29] And that is simply stimulating your muscles basically to their limit. Then allowing them to recover and come back stronger through adaptation so that you can then lift more next time. And that is how we grow strength. And that is how we grow size. But you can't do that unless you know what you are progressing, having a log, a notebook, an app.
[00:32:51] I really don't care. Just do it doing basically the same movements from session to session. And I mean, you might have four sessions in a week and they all have different movements. And then the next week they have the same movements, but you do them all a little heavier. Or you're rotating through movements over a few weeks, and then you come back to those same movements three weeks later, and you're still progressing.
[00:33:12] The point is you're progressing over time, over some period. So that's number 16 is training progress. Are you measuring it? Are you tracking it? Are you using progressive overload? Number 17. This is the last one under physical activity is your performance in the gym. So the last, the previous one was about the, the numbers.
[00:33:29] This one is about how you are not, not really how you feel though. That's part of it, but are you able to progress your numbers? Are you able to build strength? Are you able to get more reps or higher weight and feel like you're actually making progress. Now the big caveat here is if you're on a cut, if you're on a fat loss phase, you will inevitably lose strength and lose muscle mass.
[00:33:54] And so you, you will reach some plateaus in the gym. But you still should train hard as if you are building, but I'm just talking about, let's say at maintenance or in a building phase, if, if you're not making progress, then that is a clue about your sleep, about your recovery, perhaps your diet, perhaps the timing of your food, perhaps the rest period you're taking.
[00:34:19] So track your performance in the gym and you can do this by taking notes in your log. If you're tracking. Your weight, your sets, your reps, those numbers themselves, that they start to stall is part of the performance metrics that I'm talking. So that's number 17. All right. Our fifth category is behaviors.
[00:34:39] I just have a couple here and then there's two more in the last category. So number 18, what's your relationship with food? Like, has it improved? Do you have an improved relationship with food? I know with my clients, we often have situations where. You haven't been tracking and there are certain behaviors.
[00:34:58] It might be binging. It might be social events. It might be too much alcohol. It might be that you really love carbs, whatever it is. When you have a plan toward a goal, and you realize that you want to start tracking and measuring and understanding your progress and taking control of the process, then all of a sudden you start to say, Hmm, okay, I need more protein.
[00:35:21] So I'm gonna, I'm gonna eat some more meat here, maybe some more eggs and well, that's gonna, it's gonna reduce the amount of Poptarts I eat and this and that. And all of a sudden, you start to. Nudge yourself toward a, a more well rounded diet that meets your goals, but it tends to improve your relationship with food as well.
[00:35:38] Cuz you realize that there, the food is a tool. It's a tool that you have control over. You can make choices with and you can also have flexibility around. You know, with my clients, we talk about how do we plan for social events? How do we plan for parties? How can we get our alcohol in all these things we enjoy not how do we get them out, but how do we get them in and still meet our goals?
[00:35:58] So think about your relationship with food. And if there are red flags, then that is a clue that something might need to change. If you notice that it's improving, then that's a clue that, that you're probably going in the direction you wanna. Number 19 under behaviors here is, do you have a newfound confidence with your behaviors and habits?
[00:36:22] Meaning are you able to handle situations today that would previously have. Made you go off the rails. It's an important question. This is now we're getting into mindset here. I heard one of my clients recently say, you know, I feel like I now have control. I have more control. And I truly believe that that comes from having knowledge, information, certainty that you gain from a lot of these metrics.
[00:36:52] We're talking about, basically understanding more about yourself. What you're doing, what the outcome is, what each toggle each dial does to the outcome gives you the certainty that now I can choose to have whatever outcome I want by just changing some, some things here and there. So do you have a newfound confidence with your habits?
[00:37:16] That's an indication of progress. The last category is self-awareness. I have the final two measurements here. Number 20. How do you feel in your clothes? We talked about photos. We talked about circumference measurements, but how do you feel, right? How, how does that pair of short? So that shirt feel today versus how it did a month ago.
[00:37:40] And I'm not saying you're gonna necessarily feel quote unquote better, even if you have made progress. And let me explain if you're in a muscle building phase and your biceps are starting to get bigger. , but you're also getting a little bit of fatter on the waist at that shirt that fit you find on the beach in the summer may feel a little bit tight, but that's not necessarily a quote unquote bad thing.
[00:38:04] If your goal is to start building muscular size, that's just an indication of progress. So you have to look at the data and say, okay, is it going in the direction I want it. so if my clothes feel tighter, is that because I'm gaining muscle as I'm gaining a little fat along the way that I'm gonna cut later versus, okay.
[00:38:24] I'm feeling tighter because I'm gaining unwanted weight and then vice versa. Do you all of a sudden, let's say your scale weight hasn't moved, but all of a sudden you have to tighten your belt, another hole, another notch. Well, that's an indication that you've probably lost some fat, right? You're getting trimmer and you're probably gain some muscle, little recom going on.
[00:38:44] But if you had only relied on the scale weight, you wouldn't have had that data point. So how do you feel in your clothes and the last measure? Number 21. Do you love your body? This is a loaded question, but I want you to ponder it. Do you love your body? And my implication here isn't that you can't love your body.
[00:39:08] If you are overweight, that is not my implication here at all. It's do you right now with all the choices you're making with the control. You're taking over the process with your ability to see how you are arriving at your goal day by day, because you are in control and you're making choices. knowing all of that.
[00:39:28] Do you love your body? And if you do, that's wonderful. That's we all wanna be there. And if you don't, then that simply raises a question of why, and it helps you examine some of these other factors and really that's, that's up to you to examine and explore, but I want to leave you with that. Do you love your body as the last measure of progress?
[00:39:50] All right. That is the list of 21 ways to measure progress so that you can crush your fitness goals. Now you don't have to use all of these at once, but you can prioritize and choose the ones that make sense for you based on what you're trying to accomplish. And if you're looking for a good coach who can help you stay account.
[00:40:11] By monitoring these with you and making adjustments along the way, just go to wits and waits.com/coaching to connect with me so we can help you get there together. I wish you the best in crushing your goals. Stay strong. And thank you.
Have you subscribed to the podcast?
Get notified of new episodes. Use your favorite podcast app or one of the buttons below. Then hit “Subscribe” or “Follow” and you’re good to go!
