Tracking Progress
When you start an intense training program and you’ve got the supplements and diet plan ready, you need to work towards keeping track of your progress too.
It’s something that most people tend to ignore as they don’t realize the importance of this practice. You need to keep a track of your progress so that you can monitor your overall fitness progress.
Based on this info, you can then make changes to your diet or exercise plan. If you don’t track your progress, how’d you know if your struggle has given any results? Similarly, you wouldn’t know if you need to increase the amount of sets or reps you do.
Some people have set a time frame for themselves in which they have to reach a certain “gains goal”. To reach this goal in the set time span, you need to track your progress.
Here are a few ways in which you can track your progress and make changes in your muscle gain routine along the way.
Journals can be tedious and boring but are probably the most effective method of tracking your progress. For muscle gain, you need to have a workout routine with varying reps and sets for each exercise.
Also, your diet should contain snacks and meals specific for muscle gain.
Since, it’s not possible to keep all this information in your head without getting confused or mixing it all up, it’s best to record it all. To keep a track of all this, get a journal and pen down your daily eating plan and exercise habits. If you use supplements, you can also record results you’ve seen from that supplement in your journal.
Experts suggest that you should change your plan after every two months. When you do that, either get a new journal or change the format of your existing one. This’ll make it easier for you to track your progress with different plans.
For instance, if you change a supplement after two months, you can write all the pros and cons in your journal. This’ll give you a clear idea of which formula works the best for you or which workout plan is the most effective.
You can also write your short-term goals in your journal that you need to reach in two or three months’ time. If your goal is to reach 10 sets of any particular exercise, your journal will help you monitor how quickly you reach your goal and how close you are to it. You can write the following things in your journal:
It’s very convenient to track your progress using a weighing scale because it’s something that is easily accessible. You might not be able to observe any changes on daily basis but you’ll be able to see any noticeable changes if you check your weight after each week of your plan.
If your plan includes bulking up on high calorie foods to build muscle, then you’ll be able to see the results on a weighing scale. One important thing to remember is that the weight gain you see on a weighing scale may not necessarily be muscle. The weight could be water weight or fat.
If you’re clean bulking, then there’s a likelihood that the weight gain you see on your scale is muscle. You should still measure your body muscle composition to see if the weight you are gaining is actually muscle or not.
You can measure your body fat composition using body callipers. These are special devices that measure fats from several regions of the body where fat deposition is maximum.
These regions are different for men and women but mainly involve abdomen, hips, arms, thighs and chest. When measuring muscle mass, you have to assume that the mass that you’ve put on is fat.
To track your progress, you must first know your body weight before you started your muscle building plan. Of that weight, you must measure the fat mass. This can be done by various methods and you can get it determined by an expert for accurate measurements.
You have to measure the fat composition by subtracting the amount of fat in kg from the total body fat. If you weigh 50 kgs and 5 kg of that is fat mass, then you have to measure your further fat composition from that information.
Say after you start your muscle building routine, your weight increases to 70 kgs. If 5 kg of the 50 was fat, then it means that of the 20kg you have put on, the same percentage would be fat from that amount too. That percentage would be 10% and the 10% of 20kg is 2kg. This means now your overall body weight is 70kgs of which 7 kgs is fat mass and the rest is your body organs, blood and water.
In this way, you can keep a track of how much fat you’ve put on. It’s just an assumption that this is muscle mass which it could be since you are bulking up.
Another way to track your progress is to measure. This is probably the simplest way to track your progress and to visibly monitor how much muscle you’ve gained.
For this, you need to take a measuring tape and measure your biceps, chest, calves and legs. You can also measure your stomach and forearms to see how much muscle gain you’ve achieved.
You can actually measure a lot of different parts of the body but these are the main areas that you should measure to track your progress. For example, if you started with your biceps at 8 inches and after a few months of your training, the size increases to 10 or 12 inches, it’ll give you a clear idea that your routine’s working well and you’ve actually gained muscle.
This is one of the more fun ways to keep track of your progress. When you start your routine for building muscle mass, take a picture of yourself in the mirror. Then, track your progress by taking a picture every week or two times a month.
When you put all these pictures together, you’ll be able to see the changes that occurred in your body over time.
If you want, you can also print out the pictures and paste them in your journal to keep your log updated. This is a great way for keeping yourself motivated.
Sometimes, the results may be a bit subtle and you won’t really see them on yourself. But when you put all the pictures together and compare them, it becomes easier to see the difference in your gains. If you feel that the pictures aren’t showing any difference, then you may need to make some changes in your diet, workout or even your supplements.
Tracking your progress is a great way of ensuring that you don’t end up wasting your time and not getting any results. You should check your progress every week so that you can reach your short-term and long-term goals on time.