Tracking For The Win!

Following up from last episode, today we share a situation where tracking workouts and increased awareness led to a significant win.

​Episode Transcript:

[0:00] All right. Hello, hello, ladies and gentlemen. And in today's episode, we're going to be doing a quick follow-up from last week's episode when we were talking about self-awareness with training.

[0:11] Now, last week I was going on and on and on about like the importance of just knowing what you do in your training, in your nutrition, or anything you're trying to improve on. And one of the things I recommended was just keeping a track and just ticking off in a calendar, in a training up or something, what you're actually doing. So if you do need to refer back to things, if you do need to do a bit of detective work or whatever may be, you can be aware of what you're actually doing. And today, on the day of recording this episode, I had a really, really, really good example in the most positive way around how this can be so useful. So the situation was, I was talking with one of my clients, long-term client who has long-term training goals. And they have a big plan and a big goal for next year. And in the last couple of weeks, she's been dealing with a very, very busy time at work. Lots of stuff's going on, it's been getting in the way of the training and this and that, been a little bit tricky.

[1:14] And one of the comments that she sort of dropped in this week's check-in was she was like, look, I didn't have another great week or it was an okay week, but didn't quite go to plan. But what she said was like, I don't like it when I don't have time to exercise as my fitness drops back. And I'm getting nervous that I'm not going to be ready for June next year if

[1:35] this keeps up, which is an absolutely perfectly reasonable thing to think about. Because we always say when it comes to training, consistency is key. And having a good routine, having a good level of consistency is the best thing or the most important thing when it comes down to your long-term training success. And in this particular situation, after having a couple of really, really busy weeks at work and not quite hitting the targets that we wanted, it can sometimes feel a little bit tricky.

[2:03] But this is where the beauty of tracking things comes. Because for us, me and my client, we have a set check-in every single week. So every single Monday, they'll send a series of questions around what's been good, what's been bad, what they've done. And on top of that, they track what they do in their calendar. And when I saw this message, I was like, oh, that doesn't really sound like the situation that I'm kind of seeing. Like this doesn't really seem like, you know, things are quite that bad. So I went in and pulled back the last six weeks of training and the last six weeks of check-ins. And what I saw from this was I was like, okay, this last week was kind of a moderately okay week. Like it wasn't great, but it was like, you still got some decent sessions in. The week before wasn't very good. You know, nothing really got done, work took over, whatever it may be. But then looking back at the other weeks.

[2:55] From the four weeks previous to that, we had one more moderately okay week. We had one good week where pretty much everything fit in and it was pretty good. And we also had two weeks, which were absolutely spot on and they were perfect and they were amazing and she felt really, really good. So out of those six weeks in total, one not so good week, two moderately okay weeks, one good week and two really, really good weeks, which for anyone is a pretty normal stack of weeks. And for me, I could just look back in this and I brought this up. I said, look, this is what we had. And she was like, oh, that's actually cool. It just made her feel a bit reassured. It was nice seeing that.

[3:36] But it's so easy, as I said, just to get sucked into the short term. And we really don't have very good memories. As I said last episode, our memories suck. And if I asked you three weeks ago, what you did, you would forget. And in this situation, if we didn't have a record of this, it'll be very, very, very easy just to get sucked into the last couple of weeks and be like, oh my gosh, things aren't going so well. And what am I going to do? Whatever may be. When in actual fact, when we zoom out, things are actually going really well.

[4:04] And this is a perfectly normal situation to be in. So just to hammer home the point, if you are not currently aware of what you're doing, and you are not currently tracking your sessions, just ticking things off in the calendar or doing some type of journaling or whatever it may be, absolutely, absolutely make it happen. Because it can really, really pull a lot of negative side of things away when you just think you're being consistent and you're not. They can also fall into this category when we think we're being inconsistent, when actually we're smashing it, we're nailing it, and it can give us that positive reinforcement because we can see this written down just how effective it is. So if my last episode didn't convince you on this, I hope today convinced to you because it can be such a powerful thing.

[4:47] So with that being said, I'm going to wrap things up here. Just a short one today, but I wanted to hammer home this point just from this example I saw today because I thought it was really, really, really powerful. So thanks for listening. Hope you've enjoyed it and we'll talk to you very, very soon.

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