Growing Your Exercise Goals

“I hate every minute of training. But I said, don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.”

Mohammad Ali

Alright, so we talked a post or two back about the initiation of exercise. Now we must talk about growing your exercise.

After you are established – at the gym, busting it out at home, running down your street – you eventually need to up your game. Sometimes this happens naturally (if you run outside, you may start running faster before you realize it), and sometimes you have to purposefully increase the weight on your machine. Regardless, there are some things that can make doing more, easier.

Fitness Tracker

The main, number one, motivator for me regarding growing my fitness goals, has been my fitness tracker. Even to the point where one Saturday I showed up at the gym and realized that I had forgotten the tracker.

I went home.

I know, I know! As most of my gym friends told me, that was really dumb. Your body “knowing” about your workout is way more important than your fitness tracker knowing, but I just couldn’t help it. I could not STAND not getting credit for the workout. Silly, but it was important to me. (I also planned to go home, get it, and go back to the gym later that day .. that never happened. Live and learn.)

My beautiful watch – I still have a little way to go today.

The tracker that I use is an Apple Watch 4. I use Apple everything when I can (computer, watch, phone), so I am biased. I had an old, old Apple Watch (like a 1) but it was NOT tracking appropriately. This past April (about a year ago) my mother-in-law was beyond sweet enough to upgrade my watch for me and buy me the 4. It is glorious. It does everything that I want it to do, and links with anything I have needed or wanted it to. It keeps me straight, on track (most days), and allows me to track at work too, when I may be walking in addition to what I do at the gym. I also like that it has a significant face to it. I used to have the Nike Fuel band, but I think I really wanted that mostly for the name, as opposed to wanting it for the product itself.

I really do not believe that I would be as successful within my fitness work, if I did not have a tracker.

Programs

When I decided that I wanted to start running, I knew that I couldn’t do it on my own. Since I have never really been a runner – I have only dabbled here and there – and since I really dislike running (why I do it then? The world may never know) I needed some method to keep me on track, to push me, and to ultimately show me how.

Luckily, with our current electronics, you can find almost anything that you are looking for, and that you think will work for you. You can apply it through an app on your phone, your fitness tracker, or your iPad.

I have 3 screens with apps on them on my phone – here is just one of the screens. I have circled all of the health apps on this one screen alone, include C25K, which is the Couch to 5K app.

I was specifically looking for something on running, so I began to use the Couch to 5k app on my phone. There are SO many apps that it can seem overwhelming, so I spoke to a friend of mine about wanting something for running; she showed me what she used, which is ultimately what I opted for as well, (she was in the middle of resuming her running life that she had previously let go of).

This app breaks your running progress up into 9 weeks and slowly progresses you over that time. It is around 30 minutes (at least up into week 7 or so) and that was what I was looking for. Interestingly enough, when I pulled it up to download it, I had previously downloaded it with the intentions of using it, never did, and then forgot about it.

This app has fit the bill for me and my running goals. (It also has an extension for a 10k which I find intriguing.)

Insurance Incentives

I did not realize (I actually missed a year or two of benefits – annoying) that my employer/insurance company offers some “extras” for keeping track of our health and wellness.

We use an online program that assigns you points for a multitude of activities. Things like: stretching, tracking your nutrition, inputting your blood pressure and weight, working with a coach, etc. Once you have enough points (I believe it is in increments of 50) you can trade them in for a gift card of your selection. Some of our options are: Airbnb, a cruise line, airlines, or an Amazon gift card. I actually just achieved my max goal of 250 (you can’t let your points build past that) and I traded them in for a $250.00 Amazon gift card. Pretty sweet, huh?

Here is a look at some of the items that I have tracked and the points that I have earned from them.

Make sure that you learn from my mistake, and definitely check with your insurance and/or employer to see if you have something like this that is accessible to you. Employers (and insurances) want their employees and policy holders as healthy as possible, so you would think that most of them would offer something such as this; and perhaps they do. You would have actually thought that I would have stumbled across my access a while ago, since my husband was using a program like this through his work. However, he works at a hospital so I just assumed it was due of that, which meant that I never checked for myself. Silly me.

As a side note, another cool thing about this program is, it allows me to hook it directly to my Apple Watch:

I can manually track what I have done, activity wise (and I often do), but I don’t have to.

Use whatever it is that you think will be beneficial to you, in regards to keeping your motivation up and pushing yourself harder. We have so many resources at our disposal, it would be silly not to put them to work for us.