What if you could get stronger, leaner, move faster and you didn’t have to do a single minute more in the gym? There are huge opportunities in your day and week outside of the gym that will do this for you if acted upon.
1. Sleep.
No doubt we will do a deep dive on sleep another time, but to put it simply, do you track your sleep and if not, why not? The number one tool in improving recovery from training is right in front of you here. Now before you yell and scream and say “I don’t have time for eight hours’, I’m talking about improving the quality of what you have. Even if you can’t get the eight hours, simply by improving the quality of the sleep you will have huge benefits.
2. Track your food.
Yes I know this is a pain in the ass, but what if you tracked it one or two days a month to see where you’re at. It’s an uneducated opinion, but after years of watching and listening to people in the gym, I believe most people under-eat. But if you don’t track it you will never know.
3. Stress.
At the end of each day/ week score your stress for the week, record what was causing it if it is high. This will create ownership for your week, and then allow you to start working on ways to reduce the things that are creating the stress and to put strategies in place to in place to help with it when you can’t avoid it.
4. Own your program.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again here: how can you progress week to week on all your exercises if you don’t track it every session?
5. Move more.
The quest for more magical recovery work is too often put at the bottom of the priority pile. ‘I don’t have time’ being the number one reason for not doing it. But what if you incorporated it into your normal day? Maybe after a big session you go for a walk at lunch the next day, or if you sit down and watch tv you use that time to get on a foam roller. That’s more movement, more recovery, with no extra time required.
6. Track your average heart rate.
The mighty smart watch is here to help again. An elevated average heart rate can indicate a lot of negative things, one of the big ones being, increased stress.
This list could go on. You could track your steps, track your water intake, track your screen time, track your blood pressure. Just like the above, these are markers that when you track and take action to improve upon will have huge positive effects on your pursuit of kilos.
The thing I love about this, you can personalise what you track to match what you need at a particular moment. For me I’m tracking sleep quality, average heart rate and average steps. What’s yours going to be?
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