Is Accountability The ULTIMATE Fitness Hack?

Creating healthy habits like taking a morning walk or jogging and making healthy food choices can be challenging to maintain, even for those of us who are strong. The key to fitness success is accountability.

Not only should we hold ourselves accountable for the negative, but the positive things as well. Reaching our fitness goals can be challenging and even stressful sometimes, so we’re sharing five steps to help you be more accountable. Accountability is essential to achieving goals.

1: Keep Track of Your Fitness Info Consistently: Having a log of what you eat, how you feel, and your daily activity levels help keep tabs on progress. We can see our progress on paper, but it shows us all of the work we’ve put in. This helps us strive to keep up the excellent work. It also allows us to see areas we can improve.

2: Share Your Info: If you frequent the gym and have a fitness trainer, share the details you’ve been keeping track of. When your trainer has the information, it’s a bit easier for them to help guide you wherever it is you need to go. Your trainer will hold you accountable to help train you to do so for yourself.

3: Don’t Be TOO Hard On Yourself: Holding ourselves accountable for the ups and downs in fitness is an excellent way to keep striving to meet our goals. However, we shouldn’t be so hard on ourselves that we evoke feelings of shame about it. The feelings of shame and guilt have been linked with abandoning ship, leaving all efforts blowing in the wind. Tracking our fitness data and weight is meant to further encourage us by seeing what we HAVE achieved without too much focus on what we haven’t.

Of course, we should look at both the ups and downs because that’s how we improve. However, allow more focus to go towards the successes because a positive nudge carries us further than a negative one.

4: Our Accountability Works Better When It’s Externalized: When someone other than ourselves holds us accountable for our positive efforts, it can be more effective than when we self-monitor. We don’t have to have a coach or fitness trainer to share with; friends, family, and anyone else in our circle that we are confident will provide positive points of encouragement. 

5: Social Media: Whether you share your posts with close friends or the world, it can help with accountability. There are many fitness pages and groups where people share their fitness journey step by step. Sometimes it’s total strangers that say what we need to hear.

Accountability can take us a long way. In fact, it can take us all the way to the finish line if we utilize it. Accountability works both ways; be accountable for the extra serving of cake and the number of miles you walked in the last week. Be proud of your achievements, patient enough to see results, and practical about decisions.