Tracking your activity and diet are both essential in reaching your fitness goals. When starting a new fitness program at Cutting Edge Fitness, we take on a large portion of tracking your fitness and strength improvements off your plate, but you should also set up a few key tracking systems for yourself!
Below are some great fitness and nutrition tools we have found to help you track your fitness progress.
Along with one of the CEF trainers, a food journal should be your new best friend:
Starting a food and diet journal is one of the most affective ways to loose weight! With FitDay, a free online diet and weight-loss journal, you can easily start tracking your diet trends and how much protein, carbohydrates, fats, and vitamins you are consuming a day. The FitDay journal allows you to track your diet and with a little additional from us, you can calculate what you may need to consume less or more of to reach your fitness goals!
What did I do this week? Track all workouts and exercise at mapmyfitness.com to remember:
MapMyFitness.com provides you with the simple tools, calendars and community to track what you did outside the gym! With their mapping system, you no longer have to guess how long your walk, run, bike ride, swim, etc was, just map it and find out! Also, the calendar is super easy to use, and you can insert your gym time in it as well! This way, you are able to look in the calendar and ensure yourself proper rest between workouts, or call up to make an additional session for some free time you have coming up!
Always on the go? Call your workouts in using Jott and Gmail:
Honestly, we feel that tracking your fitness progress and goals with paper and a pen or on a calendar are more than adequate ways of doing so, but for those who are always on the go, a new tool has hit the market! Using Jott and Gmail lets you log your exercise and diet accomplishments by making a call from anywhere. Using the Jott software in conjunction to a Gmail account you can call, text, or email your exercise or eating activities into a specialized inbox. It comes with a monthly fee, but it's a pretty neat new way to track progress and see where you have gone in both your diet and exercise habits!
Seeing is believing! Make a photo progress calendar with Flickr:
One last tracking device that tends to keep you motivated while logging your diet, is a photo calendar! There is nothing better than actually seeing the results of your hard work! Flikr is a great online photo community that allows you to upload, tag, title and date photos. The privacy settings that Flikr has allows you to create private photo time lines, that make the perfect setting for a progress calendar! Trust us, once you start feeling and seeing results, all this tracking will be worth it! Once you hit your goal, you may even want to share some of these photos with people you know who may be looking for some inspiration in reaching their fitness goals.
Try one or try all and see the difference!
-Kerri
