Fitness: New Tracking Method / New Ideas
I’ve decided to change the way I track my fitness goals. I like the Monday-Sunday format I’ve used in the past, but a tracking method without a plan for exercise isn’t very helpful at all. So, here’s the new format:
I’ve created two new pages: Fitness Tracking and Walking Routes. “Fitness Tracking” will be a static page to keep track of my weekly exercise goals. With “Walking Routes”, I’ve used an online tool called G-Maps Pedometer to map out routes of varying lengths around the neighborhood. When I set a walking goal for the week I’ll have a clear idea of where to walk, and how far I’ve walked. With this information I can then track how fast I walk the route, the idea being that when I walk it faster I’m raising my heartrate and improving my overall cardio performance. This also will help with the boredom factor, because I can always map out a new route of the same distance. I think that the reason I’ve burned out on running in the past is because I really had no way to track what I was doing. (Though I’ll only be walking these routes… running’s too tough on my knees…) Hopefully this will help.
I’ll also have my list of exercises to choose from when I’m planning my workout for the week. The goal is to add as many different things as possible to this list so that I don’t hit the wall of boredom and stop working out. Also with this list I want to add as many things that I can do that don’t require alot of equipment. Hopefully I’ll also add a yoga practice and dance classes to this list as funds permit.
Having “Fitness Tracking” on it’s own page will make editing it from week to week much easier. I’ll also have a single .html file that I could archive later if the page becomes too unwieldy.
And here’s the plan:
- Each Sunday I’ll create a new entry for the upcoming week on my “Fitness Tracking” page by copying and pasting the previous week, just as I’ve been doing in the past in the blog post format. This is pretty quick to do.
- I’ll look at the previous week’s exercises and come up with my planned exercises for the week, using the choices from my Exercises page.
- I’ll take a look at my calendar and pencil in where I want to do these exercises. For example, I might look at my week and see that I have a heavy teaching day on Wednesday. This might be a good day to schedule as an off day. This would have the option to change as things come up in the week, but at least I’m starting with specific goals (eg. “Walk on Monday and Thursday”) in mind.
That’s it. That’s the plan. It might not be much, but at least it’s a start! : )