Keep Detailed Accounts of Your Progress
Keep Detailed Accounts of Your Progress
Getting in shape can take quite a while. It’s easy to get impatient and expect results after a week of exercise, but you have to remember that it takes much more time than that.
During that time, you will improve physically, but since the changes from week to week are so small, it can be hard to notice just how far you’ve come. In order to keep yourself motivated, you should keep lots of detailed accounts of your progress, so that you can get a very clear picture of your improvements when you feel like you’re not going anywhere.
One of the easiest ways to do this is by taking pictures of yourself. Most people do this with just underwear on, and take a front, side, and back picture. Instead of just taking a starting photo and an eventual end photo, take one each month to see your progress.
You don’t notice subtle changes in your physique since you see yourself every day. If the changes each day are minor, you’ll hardly notice them. However, two photos of yourself a month apart may look noticeably different.
You might not be exactly where you want to be, but you might see certain areas where you hold fat start to get smaller, or areas where you wanted to put on muscle have more development.
There’s also the matter of tracking numbers. Obviously, you’ll want to track your weight each week. It’s not so much recommended to track it every day, because your weight can fluctuate much more day to day than it does week to week.
Even if you’re only losing 1 pound per week, you’ll end up losing 52 pounds per year. One thing that people rarely track is how they’re feeling. Typically, after you get adjusted to the gym, people feel much happier in all aspects of life when they’re working out more often.
It’s been shown that exercise helps release endorphins, so you might notice that just by exercising more often that you’re happier in life. At first it might be a little stressful, but once you get into the groove of it you’ll really start to enjoy it...
