Kickstarting a fitness or weight loss journey is an empowering act of self-care and self love. It's saying "yes" to your needs and prioritising your own health. And one of the absolute best ways to start off on the right- foot is to use plan ahead and use a progress planner. In this blog post, I am going to share with you exactly why using a progress planner is so essential for supercharging your goals and your results. Progress planners are a powerful tool I use a lot in clinic, and now you can learn how to use one too. Let's get into it...
Why Use A Weight Loss Progress Planner?
Like anything in Life, if you want to set an achievable goal, you need a plan or a road map to get there. A progress planner can help you define, outline and set clear and actionable health goals for yourself. Whether it's weight loss, muscle gain, or improved fitness, setting specific goals and objectives is the first step toward success. From there, you can more easily map out the entire process and make your goals truly happen. Remember, a goal without a plan is just a whim!
Fitness & Weight Loss Planner Helps Track Your Progress
One you have your goals in sight, writing them down is the first logical step. The second, is having some way to track and document your fitness or weight loss efforts. A progress planner allows you to do exactly that, and provides a central space to record your workouts, nutritional intake, and other health-related data, providing insights into your progress.
Having a tracker of some sort, is also very useful to refer back to if you encounter any obstacles or a stall in your weight loss results. Alternatively, if you are successful and want to apply the same habits and strategies again in the future, you'll already have a proven road map that has worked for you once before.
A Progress Planner Holds You Accountable
Journaling your efforts not only provides a plan of what not to do, and what not to do, it also is a fantastic way to hold yourself fully accountable. Writing down your goals and tracking your daily efforts is an empowering form of self-accountability. It's a vow to yourself that you deserve to be successful, and a promise to yourself that you are going make it happen. Using a progress planner is an excellent tool and a clever way to ensure you stick to your goals.
Track & Celebrate Your Fitness Progress & Milestones
This is so ridiculously overlooked, and yet so super empowering to the journey. You need to both track your progress, and celebrate those small and big wins. Those small victories are crucial in maintaining your motivation. Getting in the mind space of accepting the little wins (just like you might a bigger wins) is crucial for staying motivated especially over the long term. This is where a progress planner can be a fabulous success tool, and allows you to track and hi-five your milestones so you can feel damn proud of your hard efforts and achievements.
Adapt & Optimise Your Efforts
By documenting your fitness or weight loss journey, a progress planner can help you to identify trends and patterns in your progress. Things like how well your body responded to a type of diet or training schedule. The recordings from your progress planner or journal can demonstrate how sleep, hydration or certain foods affected your weight loss, or the difference a certain exercise routine made to your gains or the kilos on the scale. This information is gold and can really help you adapt your routine to optimise your results, or be used again in the future to reach your goals.
BROWSE OUR HOME WORKOUT & TRACKER PRINTABLES
What Should Be In A Weight Loss Journal?
Let's breakdown some of the core things that should be included in a progress or fitness journal into three simple components:
Fitness & Weight Loss Goals
One of the first things you want to start tracking in a progress journal, is your wellness goals. You want to jot them down in clear, actionable terms so you can stay focused and see the pathway to where you want to end up. In clinic we call these SMART Goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Outlining and journaling your goals will provide clarity and keep you hyper focused throughout your journey. This is definitely one of the first recommendations to get starting with a weight loss progress journal.
Track Your Habits & Efforts Daily
In addition, dedicating at least a few minutes each day to record your workouts, your meals, weight-ins and over all progress is very helpful. Consistency is key, and being able to see the habits and actions you are taking each day towards your goals can be very motivating. This also helps when your progress feels slow and like nothing is happening. In actual fact, a lot is happening, but it can just take time to have a noticeable effect. Tracking your efforts can help you to just keep going. You'll soon start to see the change if you keep at it.
Measurements & Routines
By far one of the best uses for a progress journal is not only for tracking your before pics and measurements, but also to plan and schedule your workouts. A weekly workout plan that records your steps, distance of runs, or your gym time is a great way to stay organised and consistent each week,. At the end of the week or month, you can reflect and review your entries to identify what's working and what needs adjustment. Self-reflection is essential when you are in the process of big change.
"What gets measured gets done!" - Peter Drucker
Why A Progress Planner Is So Important
I hope this post has helped to give you a better understanding how empowering a progress planner can be for your weight loss or fitness journey. They've been a game-changer for me in my own Life, and made a massive difference for my own weight loss, as well as a stock standard exercise that I have all my clinical clients run through when we work together.
Download My Fitness & Weight Loss Planner
After sharing all the reasons why a progress planner can help you with your fitness and weight loss goals, I'd love to introduce you to my printable Fitness & Weight Loss Planner. This 11-page planner was designed by a Personal Trainer, and is purposely created to help you set goals, track your progress, and achieve your fitness goals with ease.
Inside the printable planner, you'll find weight loss progress chart pages, fitness trackers and goal planning, trackers for your weekly progress, recording your daily steps, habits and exercises, PLUS a 30 day self-challenge chart to hold yourself accountable! if you are truly ready to kick some big goals, then start your fitness and weight loss journey off right with this helpful planner set! It's super easy to download, print and file in a designated binder so you can stay on track. Your success story awaits!!
Emma Lisa, Personal Trainer & Digital Creator
Emma Lisa is a Nutritionist & Women's Health Practitioner with a Certificate III + IV in Fitness and Personal Training from Sydney, Australia. She is a published cookbook author, passionate lifestyle blogger, and advocate for women's health and anti-diet culture. When she's not in clinic, Emma is mum to five kids, in her test kitchen and a wellness digital creator.
Healthy + happiness,
Emma Lisa xx
HEALTH & NUTRITION PRACTITIONER
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Thank you Emma. I bought yours and have been using it. Feels so good to be organised and tracking things. Thanks hun