Is monitoring fitness improvements necessary & how?!?

[OnceRuralNowUrbanbliss]

My plan of relocating and having time for exercise instead of driving loads has worked out.

I'm now doing around 4 or 5 classes a week (Yoga, Zumba, pilates, kettlebells etc), swimming for 30 mins 4-6 tiles a week plus long evening dog walks.

If I don't monitor my progress as well as just turning up and doing the class/swim/walk am I missing something important?

In a year from now I expect to have better stamina, strength, muscle tone and suppleness or at least no worse than when I started (terrible as 50 and doing nothing other than sitting all week for work and driving 15+ hours a week)

Should I get a waterproof fitness watch which can track heart rate etc.
I quite like the satisfaction of my phone pedometer telling me when I've walked more than 7000 steps.

Sorry I'm clueless.

I think it depends on your aim. I do quite a lot of exercise, but I feel like I am at a good level of fitness and just want to maintain. I would like to tone a bit more so have started seeing a PT. I am 50 also.

I think you’d find satisfaction with a fitness watch. You get all sorts of ways to measure your progress, from heart rate to steps etc.
Also, do you notice you are upping your weights during workouts? Or holding a plank longer, or whatever? I like to see improvements that way.

I'm certainly less creaky, able to hold intense yoga poses for longer, no longer have a terrible painful knee and as a fringe benefit reaching for healthy food and a reduced appetite.

Yes I'd like a watch that tracks steps and if possible my metres swam plus curious about heart rate when exercising then how quickly it returns to resting. Nothing fancy.

If I don't monitor my progress as well as just turning up and doing the class/swim/walk am I missing something important?

In a year from now I expect to have better stamina, strength, muscle tone and suppleness or at least no worse than when I started (terrible as 50 and doing nothing other than sitting all week for work and driving 15+ hours a week)

It helps to track progress for a few reasons:

• you can do a progressively harder programme. This is the way to make progress


• you know what your personal bests are


• Also your baseline minima. This helps on a bad day, when it's grind or you're tired, or you've been away for a few sessions. You can say - "Well, that sucked, but I know I can get back to doing X at that level again"


• it's really motivating

I don't want to look for "progress". That kind of strategy just sets me up for failure.

So whether you should look for progress depends on how you would measure "progress" , and how you would know if you succeeded, and how you would feel if you failed (maybe you'll be inspired to work harder rather than get down about it).

I like my fitbit numbers but I don't look for any trend in them. A fitbit cannot measure any of : stamina, strength, muscle tone or suppleness. You'd have to measure those things in other ways.

I use a garmin watch and strava to record what I do and tend to keep a paper record which is where I tend to look for patterns.

I've accepted the cycles of life and having been running for 8+ years, it's useful seeing things like seasonal cycles where patterns repeat themselves year after year. It's things like accepting that I struggle to sustain running patterns in August, so I'm better off signing up to HMs in mid-October so I can build up in September. 2020/21 taught me that I can't sustain a consistent training all the time and that it's healthy to have cycles of building/ training and low pressure, fallow phases a couple of times a year. Progress usually isn't linear and I find it helpful following the ebbs and flows.

I use strava and also an FTP test for cycling (have a peloton... see user name!) and check my stats regularly
It motivates me