The hardest part of working out is getting started.  Once you’re rocking the elliptical, or your feet have hit the streets, endorphins start flowing to keep you going.  Before you start, though, you have that mental battle with yourself that makes you feel crazy:

“Okay, time to exercise.”

“No! I don’t want to! I’m too tired,” your inner self wails like a toddler.

Exercise enthusiasts recommend trying to remember how you feel after a workout and using that high to motivate yourself the next time.  Sometimes, it’s hard to recall that feeling, though.  Instead, we recommend that you use technology to track your progress so you can measure the effects of working out.  Once you see the results and realize that working out is actually working for you, it’s much easier to stay motivated!

Tracking Calories Consumed

If your goal is to lose weight, consider using mobile apps that help you to track your calorie intake and expenditure.  Many mobile apps connect with online software and databases that store a library of nutrition about individual foods.  You might not have to look up your morning Wheaties – chances are their nutritional information is already in the database and you can just add the food to your daily journal.  These software applications add up the nutritional value of the daily foods you enter, adding up the calories, vitamins, carbohydrates, proteins, and fats.  Once you’ve kept track of your food for a week, you have a pretty good sense of your average calorie intake and the makeup of the foods that you’re eating.

To lose a pound, you need to eat 3500 calories less, or burn 3500 more, than usual.  For example, if you discover you’re consuming 1800 calories per day on average based on tracking your calories, you can lose one pound per week by limiting yourself to 1300 calories per day.  (That’s a 500 calorie deficit per day, or 3500 per week).

Tracking Calories Burned

In addition to using software applications to track your calorie consumption, you can also use them to track your calorie expenditure.  Some basic sites, like myFitnessPal.com, help you estimate the number of calories you burn based on your gender, weight, activity type, and workout time.  If you want to get really accurate though, you can purchase hardware that works with the mobile apps to record your activity.  Products, like Body Media Fit’s arm band, monitor your body using sensors and store the data to internal computers.  You can then synchronize the data with the software by removing the device from your body and plugging it into your computer via USB.

Different products track different things, but the Body Media Fit arm band tracks the calories you burn and monitors your exercise intensity.  It reports the number of steps you’ve taken and hours slept while wearing the band, too.

Tracking Fitness

If you’re really into tracking and analyzing your workouts, you can monitor more than just calorie consumption and expenditure.  Using a heart rate monitor and Garmin GPS watch, for example, you can track a whole slew of personal data from your workouts including:

  • average pace,
  • elevation gain/loss,
  • distance travelled,
  • time spent,
  • average heart rate,
  • maximum heart rate,
  • average cadence,
  • and more.

Garmin also offers web-based software that imports all of this data and presents it in graphical form with charts, maps, and tables.  You can use this data to monitor your progress over time, comparing your average heart rate or average pace to previous workouts.  For example, as you get fit you might notice that your pace has picked up or your maximum heart rate has lowered.  Seeing these subtle changes can be motivating and help you achieve your goals.

Tracking Weight

If you’re looking to lose or maintain weight, part of the process requires monitoring your weight.  Technology makes this easy with wi-fi scales that record your weight and pass the data wirelessly to an online database for record keeping.  WiThings makes a wi-fi scale, accompanied with online software and a mobile app that lets you view your weight over time in chart format.  The scale also measures and tracks fat mass and BMI.

Tracking Blood Pressure

If you’re working out to improve your health, you might want to check out WiThings blood pressure monitor, which is designed for iOS devices.  You can wrap the cuff around your arm, plug the cable into your iOS device and press the start button on your mobile app to take and record your blood pressure.  You can even get an average by taking multiple measurements.  The software displays your systolic, diastolic blood pressure and heart rate.

These are just a few of the ways that you can use technology to track your progress and visually see your results before you notice the changes in your body and overall health.  So, if you’ve lost motivation in the past because you weren’t getting the results you wanted, try using these technologies to monitor your progress and maintain motivation.