Measuring Your Progress: Are You More Art or Science?

Let me ask you something.

How do you know if you have made progress towards your goals? What measurements and benchmarks do you have in place to assess whether or not you are “better?” Do you track data? Weekly? Monthly? Yearly? If your goal is weight loss, are you tracking your fat mass versus your lean body mass? Or do you go on just a scale? If you go on feel for your physical and performance results, is it effective? Are you better? Are you stronger? If so, what are you basing that upon?

If you base your success on feelings, what are they? How you feel in your clothes? Your energy in the day? Your happiness level? Your confidence level at home or at work?

Ultimately, there are two types of biofeedback we can receive from a stimulus like “fitness”: Objective or subjective.

Subjective progress is intangible. We can’t quantify but we know it’s there because we feel it. This is progress art. It is incredibly freeing because you are not necessary a slave to data, but there is also a natural lack of accountability built into this way to measure our success. If it’s not really there, then we can’t really recognize or deny its existence. It’s low stress, but it can be costly on your time, as well. In the subjective approach, we don’t know if our say, our body fat percentage is down because we haven’t set a baseline and observed its change, we don’t know if we’ve gotten stronger because we don’t track our lifts. We don’t know if adding a third class per week to our routine provides a return on our progress because we “go when we can”. We don’t know if we’re getting the right amount of protein because we don’t measure.

Sooner or later, if you want to really make measured progress you can’t do so in a willful state of ignorance.

Objective progress is the opposite. Because it is scientific in nature is indisputable. You started at x and you are now at y. Study after study shows that those who measure achieve faster desirable outcomes across all goals than those who don’t. It’s also where those who have aptitude for science will have to operate. Subjectivity will drive these types mad.

Here are some easy ones.

1. Log all of our meals. Analog. Just keep a journal of what you eat without tying a calorie count to it. Areas for improvement will easily stand out.
2. Log your barbell lifts. Squats, deadlifts, cleans, snatches, jerks. The barbell lifts drive the fastest adaptation, simply focusing there can do wonders.

That’s it. Two easy areas to begin to send the shift to your brain away from abstract art and into the certain science.

If you’re ready for more?

1. Track your gym frequency.
2. Track your training time of day.
3. Track your water intake.
4. Log your sleep.
5. Track your protein intake. 

Here’s the thing. You can absolutely be productive in the gym and create a healthy routine where the measurements are subjective, this is honestly not a terrible place to live if you don’t treat the gym with that much gravity and just want to maintain a generally healthy lifestyle. That’s me these days, to be honest. It’s stress free and my priorities of running a business and starting a family take a front seat to hard lined fitness outcomes.

But…I also understand that it is not nearly as effective if I wanted to set some specified, defined goals.

If you have some tangible goals that you want to reach, then take the ambiguity out of your fitness and collect data on yourself. Know with confidence where you are on the journey, and what you have to do to end up at your goals. Otherwise you’ll always go off of feel, and feel can easily be falsely influenced by emotion.

-Dave