Starting Your Fitness Journey, Backed With Science!

A huge hurdle in starting and developing a solid fitness routine usually lies with not having a plan and success measures. This is where technology can help.

Does this sound familiar?

Set a New Year’s Resolution to get in shape.

Day 1: start a new gym membership and workout!

Day 10: Combination of aches and pains causes you to cut back the time at the gym or even miss a planned gym session.

Day 30: The gym and fitness routine planned is no longer being followed and wait 11 more months to create a “New” New Year’s Resolution about getting in shape.

If this does sound familiar, there are a mountain of reasons why people aren’t able to achieve their fitness goals and in this article, we will help define some proven methods to help start, support, and measure success for a more healthy lifestyle. Admittedly, the hardest part of starting a routine is “starting” it and getting yourself to do something, but to help sustain, improve and build upon it, there’s additional work to be done. I have been active with both a regular gym routine and in sports for the past 10 years and below are some of the new methods that I have implemented in my own routine that will help others build and sustain the momentum to get healthy. This article from Harvard Medical School details how to coach yourself to success (Link).

If you had to look at a couple of factors of fitness there are two main factors within your lifestyle that you can control that affects ones’ wellbeing and health:

Exercise
Diet

Although this might be intuitive, how you choose to tackle the two and how methodical your approach is, will allow you to benchmark your progress and further encourage yourself to improve and develop a healthy lifestyle. The theme of this article will be leveraging technology in your health and wellness journey. Today, technology in the form of wearable tech and smartphones allows us to have so much available at our fingertips.

Developing an Exercise Plan

Once you committed to starting a fitness journey identifying goals and targets is the next step. The key point on fitness goals is to make them realistic and attainable, no point in saying your goal is to look like a professional athlete and/or model. The fitness journey is a long one and making sure that you set yourself in a mentally good zone is key to not discourage yourself. Depending on what you want to do (i.e. go to a gym with equipment and weights, running/walking, start a new sport), coming up with a workout regime helps develop a targeted plan. Many people just show up to the gym and start to do things aimlessly and then get discouraged as they have no plan. Avoid this by researching on websites for a workout plan. A typical workout plan that you can find on the internet usually lays out a set of exercises and routines for a whole week. I use this approach and the workout plan I have is in pdf format which I save to notes on my iPhone. I get to the gym review the exercises I need to do and get to work. This will help to drive focus and efficiency at the gym. In addition, with the little computer in your hand (aka the smartphone) you can review how to perform those exercises by searching on youtube or any other fitness website of your choice.

With no endorsement of the sites below, here is a list of potential sites where you can help find and choose the workout plan that suits your current fitness level and goals:

Muscle and Fitness Workout Plan — I use this site a bit to read and review plans created by fitness professionals and change my workouts to ensure a balanced plan
Runner’s World — For those that want to lean towards running.
TrainRight.com — Triathlon-based workouts for those planning to compete.

Measuring Success

I personally have found this to be a game-changer for myself. I recently purchased an Apple Watch and must say measuring my workouts, heart rate, movements, and sleep have been eye-opening. It actually has increased my efficiency in the gym and helped me to set targets and marks while I workout. I have a good friend who when talking about performance and improvement at work says that:

You can only improve what you measure!

This is so true, especially in the context of the gym. There is a variety of wearable tech that you can purchase that takes biometric measurements while you are working out (like FitBit, Apple Watch, Whoop to name a few). In addition, there are apps that you can download on your smartphone that will help to crunch some additional analytics giving you greater insights. Utilizing the data can help find spots and areas that you can target in future workouts. For example, I have noticed that in a normal gym session between traditional weightlifting and cardio I should at a minimum target of a 500 active calorie workout to ensure that I’m not sandbagging a workout or being lazy that day. I’ve also noticed that by looking at my heart rate across my workout I can spot times that I over-rested between sets and could see opportunities to be more regular in my rest periods. To give you a more scientific approach to wearable tech challenges and opportunities here is an article reported in the Journal of Rehabilitation and Assistive Technologies Engineering (Link).

Promoting a Healthy Diet

I’ll be relatively brief on this section as defining a healthy diet for an individual is best done with the help of your physician and understanding any limitations and/or restrictions that you may have. The ultimate goal of a healthy diet is to ensure that you get the necessary nutrients and vitamins each day to support your body and your new workout routine.

I will say a quick word on supplements. I currently use supplements for my workout and say that there is no magic power and/or secret sauce in them that will make you a healthier or fitter person. Supplements only really work when you combine them with a strong and devoted workout routine to see the true effects of the supplements. In short, you can’t take buy and take a supplement and thing that will make up for not putting in the effort at the gym or during your workout.

Wrap Up

In short, to begin to be a better you the things to focus on when starting up that new workout to reach your fitness goals are:

Set realistic goals and targets
Find a weekly workout routine that you can follow and that meets your current fitness level and goals
Utilize technology to help measure your goals. Only by measuring your performance can you then go on to set tougher future goals
Review your performance for opportunities to improve your workouts
Ensure that you have a plan for a healthy diet and determine if supplementing your diet is right for your workouts and goals.

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