Are you tracking your health and wellbeing? – Keep’er Fit

Nowadays, wearable trackable devices are all the rage. Apple watches, fit bits, Garmins, whoop, and Oura rings are the must-haves. If you own one, are you getting the most out of them? Do you understand the readings? And, most importantly, how accurate are they?

Currently, I have invested in a new Venu Garmin watch and Oura ring. I will review these in a few weeks.

All of these ‘gadgets’ are great but if you want to make even better use of them, write down your workout and a short description of how you think the session felt. Tracking devices do just that – they track. What they don’t do is connect to how you are feeling or how you felt before, during and after the session. They will use metrics like sleep, heart rate variability and readiness to train – use these but also listen to your own body. You know it better than any wristwatch.

Why should you write all your training out?

There are a number of benefits for writing your sessions out in a diary or note book. I would suggest that you purchase an A5 day by day diary. It’s easy to see what days you have trained and gives you enough room to write about all the info you need. Once you start writing these out week after week, you will soon notice patterns in your own training, progressions, and just how far you have come. Writing it out also gives you that extra sense of satisfaction. After I finish a run, swim and cycle, I love to come into the house and put all the data from my watch onto paper. I will also rate my training using the RPE scale from 1-10 and comment of how I felt pre, during and post training.

Prepare your week every Sunday night

Spend 15/20min to write out what days you are training and what you will be doing. Physically writing something down hugely increases your change of completing it. By planning and looking ahead to what your week is looking like, it’s easier to fit in your training session. Maybe you have to change a gym session to a different day because of another commitment, or change your early morning session because you know you’ll be in bed late the night before. Once you have done this all you need to do is review what time and type of training are you doing at the end of each day throughout the week.

Commit to this for 60 days

Write a plan, make a commitment to yourself and then take action. If you continue to do this for 60 days you will make it a habit, something that automatically happens. There is a very easy way to see if it’s working too, just look at your results. Results don’t lie, if you aren’t hitting your targets, then the first question you should ask yourself is, was I fully committed

Start tracking your training, and then progress to nutrition, work and life. We can only measure what we track.

By Gary Wallace