The importance of tracking to measure & improve fitness performance

Myzone study on the positive effects of effort visibility

Myzone provides an accurate fitness tracker and social platform that rewards users for their effort in physical activity. They recently conducted an eight-week study to examine the impact of effort measurement on motivation, performance and happiness. The results demonstrated that those who could see their effort whilst exercising achieved higher motivation to continue, with the most noticeable improvement in the beginner's group. For more information on this study, visit Myzone. 

How FITR helps coaches and clients track performance

FITR offers a range of powerful performance tracking tools for personal trainersto utilise directly in the platform, providing a graphical representation for clients to understand how their performance is changing over time. Whether looking at body metrics or utilising the benchmark tracking tool, tracking these metrics can help to motivate clients and improve how they respond to your coaching. This is another tool to keep your clients engaged, which increases the chance of retaining them in the long term and helping you to grow your business.

FITR Body Metrics Tracking

Clients can add body metric entries directly within the client app for review, helping them and their coach to measure progress over time and better understand how to advance their training. They can also attach notes and media to help their coaches understand each logged performance.
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Using FITR, coaches can analyse their clients' body metrics entries to customise training based on indicators such as the following:
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• Blood pressure
• Body mass index (BMI)
• Chest
• Heart rate variability (HRV)
• Hip circumference
• Max heart rate
• Grip strength
• Calf
• Body fat %
• Muscle mass %
• Resting heart rate (RHR)
• Thigh

Benchmark Tracking

Benchmarking a routine exercise and repeating it over time is another way FITR helps track effort and progress throughout a client’s fitness journey. Regardless of what fitness category a client falls under, benchmarks can be personalised to the individual ability and scaled if needed. 
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As a PT using FITR, you can choose from over 1000 pre-loaded benchmarks and drop them into your training schedules. Clients can record, track, comment and add videos to their benchmarks via the FITR Client Mobile App, allowing them to monitor performance and improve their personal bests.

Challenges

Creating Challenges where client performances are displayed on a central leaderboard is a great way to generate healthy competition and motivate your clients. With FITR, you can inject Challenges into multiple programs to connect your entire client base. By repeating the same Challenge over time, coach and client can track Challenge entries and work towards improving positions on the central leaderboard.

Coach Spotlight: Steven Fawcett on the importance of measurement 

We caught up with Steven Fawcett, who's involved in the product development of FITR and owns JST Compete. Here's his take on the importance of measuring and tracking performance.

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FITR: Hi Steven, so why measure progress?

Steven: Everyone gets into fitness because they want to improve themselves in some way, shape or form. They might want to improve their quality of life, sports performance or body composition.

You need to record a starting point to know if you're improving or have improved. Everyone starts somewhere, but if you know where that somewhere is, you can track your progress much more successfully.

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FITR: What do you think is essential when tracking progress?

Steven: For people wanting to improve body composition, it's not all about weight loss; that is why body composition coaches track many different metrics - to see the whole picture. 

Tracking just weight could be demotivating if it stalled for a few weeks; however, monitoring body fat percentage, measurements and other health measures could show improvement in other areas.

Athletes may feel like they haven't improved in the last few months of training if they aren't recording their results, but they are just thinking back to what they have remembered rather than the tiny improvements that add up daily. Recording progress here shows the bigger picture and gives athletes and coaches cold hard facts about the direction their training has been going in.

Tracking your training is important no matter what you are training for; it tells you the story of how far you've come.

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