Tracking your fitness effectively is one of the most recommended means to ensure successfully following through on your fitness goals. Steps like:
- keeping track of your daily workouts, reps, sets and notes on performance.
- Taking body measurements such as weights, body fat percentage and waist/hip/shoulder/etc circumferences.
- Tracking what you are eating and how much.
Tracking your fitness in this manner can be a major asset and excellent for keeping on task.
If it works for you.
While it does for some (most likely those of us that love numbers, statistics, graphs, measurement), there are just as many, if not more, for whom it doesn’t. It becomes all encompassing, overwhelming and unsustainable. Yet without a means to gauge our progress, which we translate immediately into “success”, it can be difficult to stay motivated or focused on sticking to our current program of choice, long term goals and beyond.
What if “tracking your fitness” took a different form? What if what we were tracking was not numbers, but a journey? What if each period of training we went through, each new program we undertook, each new challenge we faced was a clue, a track, drawing us along in a mystery of discovery?
The following is a quote from renown tracker and wilderness survivalist Tom Brown Jr.’s book “The Tracker”:
“The first track is the end of a string. At the far end, a being is moving; a mystery, dropping a hint about itself every so many feet, telling you more about itself until you can almost see it, even before you come to it. The mystery reveals itself slowly, track by track, giving its genealogy early to coax you in. Further on, it will tell you the intimate details of its life and work, until you know the maker of the track like a lifelong friend.”
~ Tom Brown, Jr. ~
That being moving at the far end… is you.
If we apply this perspective to our ongoing journey, the you at the end is the sum of all your years, experiences, trials and growth. It is the you that is closer to your greatest capacity, your highest potential, your ultimate expression.
Every program or practice you undertake along the way is a track, a sign leaving behind hints as to what “will have served you” the most moving forward. And as you follow the tracks before you, it will give you more details about the characteristics, strengths, challenges, qualities and all manner of intimate detail, until you know their maker like a lifelong friend.
Tracking your fitness can be done by the numbers. It can be a valuable system to support the consistent steps for growth. But it is only related to the short term vision. Marry it with a long term vision, the bigger picture of unraveling the mystery before you; of an adventure in discovery. Doing so, no matter where the numbers fall from day to week to month, will have you holding a line that is forever coaxing you on…
Dare To Evolve,
Shane Heins.
