Benchmarking your fitness level

You never know where you are going if you did not benchmark where you started and know where you are today.

Tough to keep up woth that sentence but I have run into a couple of people over the last few days that are not sure if they are moving forward or not. One girl that I know says that her weight stays in a five pound range and she started working out a couple weeks ago and says she is at the high end of her five pound range. The other person was watching the X-Weighted TV show and wanted to know how they exactly did the testing at the beginning of the show.

So here is a few things to look at today that will help you in benchmarking your fitness goals.

Most people trying to change their habits and get in better shape have a few things that they care about, Weight, food intake, strength, flexibility, and fitness stamina.

So when you start or even starting today you need to start a diary or journal where you can do weekly updates of a few things to know where you are today and tomorrow.

Weight

Easy enough here, you should weigh yourself once a week and see where you are at. This to me is only one thing that you should take into account when measuring your fitness.

Food Intake

Food journaling is something that every big diet from the Zone Diet, Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers all have you do. It is important to know from one day to the next what you are eating and why. If you track your food intake then you can tell where your weaknesses are and always able to look back to see what you were doing bad and well in the past.

Strength

Strength is a very easy to measure stat. Find a range of exercises that you can do. You can do the easy things like number of squats, situps, push ups or calf raises. If you have weights you have a huge range, you can do bench presses, bicep curls, tricep extensions, as well as many other weight bearing exercises. There are two ways to track. The number of reps that you can do at a certain weight or the amount of weight you can do for 10 reps. To me there is no difference in these two types of benchmarking and you can do one or the other or mix them up.

Flexibility

Flexibility is one of those things that no one seems to care about but is increbibbly important to your overall fitness and your lifestyle. Having flexability is hard to test at times so this one is single reps and seeing where you are. Some examples of flexibility are stretching your calves down and see how far down you can stretch your calves, also stretching over to one side and the other at your hips and in front to see how far down you can reach to touch your toes.

Fitness Stamina

Fitness stamina is another easy to track set of exercises. How fast can you go a mile, running or walking? How long can you stand on one leg? if you are in the top of a pushup how long can you stay up? How many miles can you bike in an hour?

You have to start tracking the changes in your life if you have not already started doing so. Wouldn’t you love to know in a month or a year or 5 years? You do also have bad days as well as good days and on those bad days you need to be able to look back and see that you are doing great and pick yourself up again.

So today, tonight, or even tomorrow make sure that you have done some of these tests so that you can have a great way to track yourself and where you are going to be.

Looking to make a change and lose some weight? I have reviewed the top diet on the internet and you can go and read over 200 comments people have made about why this diet has worked well for them, as well as some of the problems.

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