Assuming you have some sort of fitness goals then you should be tracking progress with some sort of measurement data. This does not need to be too deep but if you have nothing then it will certainly undermine your overall progress. Here are the best methods for most people:
Clothes Over Scales – Still the vast majority of people use their weight to track progress over specific items of clothing. This would be ok if you were able to rationally understand that weight in addition to body fat shows your hydration, food in your digestion system and your carb stores in the body. All of these can change more in 24 hours than you can actually lose in a genuine week of healthy eating. This means it is not a reliable system to track progress shorter term. Specific items of clothing (not any clothes but that pair of jeans and favourite red top etc) give much more real feedback and helpful analysis. I never used the scales during my bodybuilding days for feedback as I knew it was too unreliable.
Health traits Over Energy – When your goals centre on health, one of the problems is that most people just pick one element, such as energy, or not being ill, but this is too narrow to really feel the full spectrum of how health improves or worsens over time. You may remember last year I gave you a health traits form you can complete, alongside a behaviour predictors survey, which estimates how your future health will become based on your current behaviour patterns. You can fill that form out here>>, you could then compare it to previous years. Note – If you complete it, I will email a report which 100% will be in your junk mail folder so look for it there.
Specific fitness measures over how good you feel – When it comes to fitness, it is simply the time it takes you to do something. This could be the time to walk from your gate to the top of the hill, or how long it takes you to run/walk 1km. All aerobic events have a specific fitness measure most people use, for running it is probably 5km time, cycling your ftp score, or rowing your 2000m time. Your fitness data does not have to be taken by you absolutely destroying yourself. You could measure your time using a 7/10 effort. If you are using max out times for your data, understand you will not be able to beat it on just any old day. Shorter fitness tests require high amounts of desire or motivation on the day to want to push through it. So the better your time gets, the more everything needs to be in place for you to set a new personal best. For example, despite training full time, Usain Bolt did not break his personal best in the 100m or 200m for the last 8 years of his career (these are still the current world records for 100m and 200m).
Movement patterns over strength – While strength tests are often associated with say the bench press, what is more important for most people is the ability to move. Your ability to lunge or straight leg deadlift is way more important for how good you feel in life than how strong you are on the bench. For regular strength athletes, you can take measures in your favourite movements but do not sleep on those most related to feeling good in life. The solution for improvements often lies in flexibility over actual strength training.
What Does This Mean For You
If you are trying to make progress this year then you need to choose measurements that actually reflect what you are trying to change. Pick one or two markers that genuinely matter to you and track them consistently over time. You do not need to be retesting every week, or even every month, but the data gives you a conceptual framwork around the results you are trying to achieve.
Alongside this you should track the behaviour tasks that are likely to bring about the overall results, e.g. use a wall chart for how many times you hit 10,000 steps, exercise sessions done or distance ran per month. Progress is rarely dramatic week to week, but when you look back over months the direction becomes obvious. Good tracking removes emotion, stops panic and lets you stay patient for long enough to see results actually happen.
A reminder that to help you with results in 2026 my new daily video programme Couch to Cloud 9, is still free to sign up to at the moment. It is designed to run in the background of your health & fitness efforts while motivating and encouraging you to make better choices.
Photo – Some pics of my tracking data, my bodybuilding prep phase and my current hyrox spreadsheet –
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