What is it?
You can’t manage what you don’t measure is an aphorism often used in business, but it is extremely applicable to health and fitness as well. At the root of every health and fitness goal is a series of adaptations in your body that we need to drive. To drive those adaptations, we will use a variety of inputs. We need to be able to figure out what inputs work best and when to turn up the dials. Because turning up the dials is necessary to drive further adaptations.
This theory of progressive overload is a concept used in hypertrophy and strength training, but it is equally applicable to pretty much all areas of health and fitness as it is based on our body’s innate biology. Our bodies will simply stop adapting to the same stimulus once their response reaches a sufficient level. This is programmed by evolution. Why spend valuable extra resources over adapting to the same stimulus? But we have no hope of figuring out when and how much we need to up the stimulus if we aren’t even tracking what we are doing. So tracking is a foundational skill.
Why do I want it?
Tracking applies to pretty much every level of what we do. On the most global level, how can we know if you are hitting your goals unless we set them and track progress towards them?
On a more tactical level, how can we know whether we are driving adaptations if we don’t measure them? Changes can be small and incremental on the way to big and profound. Big and profound may take years, but small and incremental can happen in weeks or months. We want to spot those small and incremental ones, because they reinforce that the program is working and we are on the right path. They also serve as powerful motivators.
On a more micro/practical level, if we don’t measure what we did in a particular session, how do we know what we did for a particular week? How do we know if next week was more stimulus or less? We really can’t get anywhere without the hard data.
How do I train it?
We start with objective and subjective baseline assessments of important metrics for you and your program. This will vary by goal state and individual, but think of them broadly broken down into body composition, performance and health metrics. Objective body comp measures include things like weight, lean body mass, body fat percentage and girth measurements. Subjective measures might include things like which muscle groups you think are smallest or weakest and which you feel are strongest and largest on your own body. Subjective measures might even include pictures. Performance measures may include things like one rep maxes on different lifts, VO2Max, HRR, baseline training volume, etc. But subjective measures are important here too. Like what exercises do you like and dislike? Finally, health metrics are important in some programs if you are looking for health related outcomes. Many of these are things you’ll have from your doctor’s blood work and office visits, but HA1C, blood pressure, APoB, inflammatory markers, etc.. are all examples of objective health measures.
Once we have the objective and subjective baseline assessments in place, we will routinely update them throughout the program to understand the impact we are having.
But tracking goes beyond the outputs. We also need to track the inputs. 90%+ of the people in the gym are not tracking anything. And that’s totally fine if your goal is to go to the gym a few times a week and put in some time to be more healthy. But if there is a more specific long and short term goal, you pretty much have to track the input variables. As we saw above, adaptations require progressive overload and progressive overload requires increasing the stimulus. How many sets of chest workouts did you do last week? What about just strength sets on the bench? You need to know that to make sure you do as many this week or more. How many reps? What weight? What total volume? There is no possible way to keep all of the data in your head from week to week. So you have to learn to track it. Cardiovascular adaptations are no different. How far did you walk last week (or how many steps) and at what pace? Were there hills involved? How many and how high?
And this isn’t all that hard. From heart rate monitors to spreadsheet models to fitness watches, we can use tools to get this dialed in pretty fast.