Tracking Your Progress
By Courtney Townley
"If you always do what you have always done, you will always get what you have already got". How many people do you see at the gym on a daily basis doing the same routine that you have seen them doing every day since you joined? A lot, I bet. And how many changes have you seen in the bodies of those repeating those same routines? None, you say? Not surprising, considering the fact that the human body is a highly adaptable performance mechanism. In other words, in a relatively short amount of time, our bodies get really good at performing movements that we practice repeatedly, and that means our bodies have to exert less effort to execute a movement that just a few weeks ago felt like mission impossible. Less effort (or more efficency), means less calories expended, which leads to a plateau in fat loss.
Think about it. If you did 30 minutes of cardio on the same machine, at the same intensity for weeks on end, your body would do what it was designed to do......it would get more efficient at the 30 minutes of cardio. Ultimately, that means after several days your body would burn fewer calories to perform the 30 minute cardio session than it did on the first day did it. So if your goal is fat loss.... yikes! To burn fat we want to burn more calories not less.
It takes a lot of time and energy to be creative with your fitness program, but that is why many of you have opted to hire a coach. Your Genesis coach's job each week, is not only to educate you about healthy living, but to help you sort out all of the ways in which you can prevent a plateau and continue moving along to your fat loss goal. Genesis coaches have many variables to play with but the main ones are: calorie intake, strength training and cardiovascular exercise.
The job of your Genesis coach is to suggest changes in your calorie intake and exercise program that will keep you in line with your goal of fat loss. The Genesis Transformation online journal allows you to record your foods, which allows the coach to see where changes can be made with caloric intake and food choices. You, the client, are responsible for recording the cardio and weight program that your coach suggests in your own hand written journal. The information you record in your training journal, if well organized and detailed, can be an enormously powerful tool along your transformation process. The training journal can help both you and your coach identify where you are, and what changes need to be made each week to get you to where you want to be.
Things to consider recording in your workout journal, include: the time of day you exercised, the type of cardio you did, the intensity and speed of the cardio (if using a machine), exercises you did for strength training, amount of weight used for each set, the number of reps performed for each set, the speed at which you performed each exercise, and the amount of time you took to recover. Once you have tracked your workouts, you and your coach can come up with ways in which to vary those workouts to ensure that you are challenging yourself weekly and avoiding a plateau. True fat loss is a slow process to be sure, but recording your workouts, like journaling your food, can be instrumental in moving you towards your goal along the healthiest and quickest path possible.
