Are you monitoring your exercise progress?

The only way to figure out whether you are changing or improving on something is by monitoring your progress.Just like all other things, this also applies to exercising routines and you need to do regular monitoring to know whether you are working out enough or not.Monitoring also gives you added motivation, for instance if you know you did a 5 mile run yesterday yet you don’t feel like you can complete that today, you will probably push on anyway just so you can reach your goal.

There are lots of ways you could measure your fitness progress, you could take readings on your lung capacity, you could monitor your resting heart rate, but I think the best way to do it is simply to monitor how hard you are pushing yourself when you exercise.You could consider the measure for this pushing by the amount you lift, or the distance that you run or cycle, the speed of your sprinting or cycling and the number of breaks you take.The best thing is to keep monitoring all these aspects and then keep improving on these parameters, even if by a small margin to ensure that you are making progress.

You’ll get the most accurate measurements at the gym because the machines will accurately tell you your speed and the time you have spent on the machine, so this is definitely easier at the gym.However, you can do monitoring of your pulse and exercising even outside by wearing a pedometer to track the distance and a a strapless heart rate monitor watch to monitor the time you take and your heart rate, thus giving you complete information.You can even consider getting the high-tech Nike sensors, which can attach to your shoes and provide information about your distance, time and calories burnt to iPod device.

Once you have some stats from your normal sessions then find something you aim to beat the next time you exercise.If you are jogging outside then maybe you’d like to shave 5 seconds off your run time, or if you are at the gym maybe you want to continue jogging on the treadmill for 5 seconds longer.Your first impulse will be to try and add a minute to your run, or knock a minute off the time it took to run a distance, which is fine, but then what do you do the next time?You need to make very small improvements each time and they will lead to big improvements over time.

While a 5 second improvement may seem miniscule, over a period of 10 sessions, it will improve to an impressive 50 second improvement.Or a good thing to aim for is distance, if you are outside try to run to the next lamppost each time and that will soon add up, or in the gym add on another 25m to your run, and soon you’ll be running further than you ever thought you could.