MONITORING YOUR PROGRESS: HOW TO STAY ACTIVE AND MOTIVATED
Introduction
In the journey toward a more active lifestyle, especially within the structure of the office day, the importance of monitoring and tracking your physical activity cannot be overstated.
It's not just about setting goals and implementing changes, it's about understanding how effective these changes are. Monitoring your progress is a powerful tool that keeps you motivated, helps you stay on track, and provides insights into your health and fitness journey.
Through tracking your physical activity, you will be able to see tangible outcomes, identify patterns, habits and better understand the relationship between physical activity and other aspects of your health.
The Role of Monitoring
Regularly monitoring your activity will help you build a comprehensive picture of your habits, behaviours and patterns. This information will give you’re a foundation for making informed decisions about how and when to make changes to your activity levels.
When we monitor our activity levels, we are documenting the duration, intensity, frequency and activities that make up our daily physical activity totals. By keeping a record of your daily physical activity and you can get many valuable insights about your habits and behaviours.
We can monitor our activities in different ways, including digital tools, manual logs, wearable technology. Whatever form you choose a written record of you daily activity can help you identify what is working and what isn’t in your workday routine.
Monitoring your daily physical activity can you help quantify:
How long you sit every day.
How active you are every day.
How often you get up and move about from your desk.
What work tasks require you to be seated.
When you could move and be active during the day.
If you achieve or exceed the minimum weekly physical activity recommendations.
How physical activity impacts your energy and productivity.
How different times of the day affect your activity levels.
How sitting &/ physical activity affects your mood and wellbeing.
How colleagues influence your activity levels.
How environmental factors affect your activity levels.
As you start to take regular breaks and document your activity through monitoring, you will hopefully be able to see tangible progress. This sense of achievement can help boost your motivation, positively reinforcing the value of active breaks.
There is an element of increased accountability when you know that you need to record your activities. This monitoring can help hold you accountable to the activity plan you set for yourself and remind you to stay consistent in taking regular breaks.
Establishing your Baseline Activity Level
Assessing your current level of physical activity is essential for understanding if you meet, exceed or fall below the recommended levels of daily and weekly physical activity.
Establishing a baseline of your habitual behaviour will help give you a clear picture of your current routine and serve as a foundation to build on as you start to integrate active breaks into your workday.
Establishing a baseline activity level involves tracking your daily movements and sedentary behaviours. You can do this over in a day, or for a more comprehensive overview, you should document your activity for a week.
To start, keep a simple log, noting down all your daily activities and how long each lasts. Include everything you do from structured exercises, like gym sessions or jogs, to less obvious forms of movement such as walking to the store, gardening, or even household chores. It's important to capture the full range of your activities to get an accurate baseline.
Pay attention to the time you spend sitting. Record how long you sit at your desk, during your commute, or in meetings. Note periods of inactivity, such as watching TV or standing in elevators. Understanding the balance between active and sedentary time is useful for identifying opportunities to increase movement.
Reflect on your routine against recommended activity guidelines, specifically the minimum recommendation of 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity per week. Compare your logged activities to the recommendations to see if you meet, exceed, or fall short of them. This comparison helps highlight areas where you might need to increase your activity.
Understanding your current activity pattern is the first step in making a change and create a healthier, more active lifestyle. When you start to introduce active breaks into your workday you can use this base line to monitor your progress and evaluate the strategies you are using.
Testing which Active Breaks Strategies Work for You
In the active break programme, we recommend starting out by testing one strategy at a time. This allows you to focus on making just one change a day and clearly assess its effect.
We have created a template that people can use to monitor and document their testing. The template allows people to plan their workday, decide in advance which strategy they want to use and when it can be completed during the day.
There is space in the template to record reflections and thoughts about how each day went, helping people to build a set of information that will help them design the most effective active breaks for their workday.
As people progress through the programme, they will develop a shortlist of preferred activities that work well for them. Using the Daily Planner to monitor and record their progress through this testing phase people will be familiar with using it when they start to plan more complex, varied active break workday.
Monitoring Your Active Breaks
Using the shortlist of active breaks and Daily Planner Template together people can start to create a more dynamic active workday by choosing different strategies for different types of breaks.
Monitoring your progress, you will be able to track the number of steps, breaks or standing activities you do every day. Whatever your activity preferences and choices monitoring can support you in making the change to a more active day.
You might discover, for example, that you're more sedentary on certain days of the week or during certain times of the day. This information allows you to tailor your approach to being active, targeting those times with specific strategies to increase movement.
Or you might notice improvements in your sleep quality or a reduction in stress levels, further reinforcing the benefits of staying active.
Self-monitoring has been identified as one of the most important behaviour change techniques to increase health behaviour. The quantitative and qualitative data you capture through regular monitoring can serve as a motivational tool, encouraging you to keep pushing forward and make active breaks a non-negotiable feature of your workday.
Monitoring Tools: Digital, Manual and Wearable Options
The Active Break Planner isn’t the only way to record and monitor your active breaks. Here are several other tools and methods you can use:
Digital Tools and Apps
There are several apps that you can use to track physical activity, such as Fitbit, MyFitnessPal, and Google Fit. These tools provide detailed insights into your activity levels, including step counts, calories burned, and exercise duration. Using these apps you can regularly sync your data, and review your progress reports.
Manual Tracking
For people who prefer a more traditional approach, keeping a physical journal, planner, or spreadsheet is an effective method. Writing down your daily activities and reflecting on them can provide a more personal touch to monitoring.
Wearable Technology
Fitness trackers and smartwatches offer a convenient way to monitor your activity. They come with features like heart rate monitoring, step counting, and sleep tracking which can be useful data to capture and use for analysis.
Whichever method you choose to monitor your active breaks try to use it consistently. This will allow you to build a complete record of your journey and give you the best set of data to use to analyse and evaluate.
Summary
Monitoring your progress is an essential component of maintaining an active and healthy lifestyle, particularly within the constraints of a busy workday.
By taking a proactive approach to planning and documenting your physical activities, you gain invaluable insights into your habits and behaviours, allowing you to make informed decisions and adjustments.
Establishing a baseline activity level provides a clear starting point, while testing various active break strategies helps identify what works best for you. Consistent monitoring not only tracks your progress but also serves as a motivational tool, reinforcing your commitment to staying active.
Whether you use digital tools, manual tracking, or wearable technology, finding the right method for monitoring your activity is key to maintaining consistency and achieving your goals.
Embrace the power of planning and self-monitoring to transform your daily routine into a more dynamic and health-conscious experience. By doing so, you will not only enhance your physical wellbeing but also boost your mental clarity, productivity, and overall job satisfaction.
