How you can use habit tracking to make exercise a daily habit
Have you ever tried to start a new habit and no matter how hard you tried, it never stuck? If so, stick around because I have the tool just for you.
The thing that will often separate the best performers in any field and the rest is that the best performers will often track their progress to see whether they are on the track to achieve their desired outcome. This post is not intended to make you the best in your field or to turn you into an elite athlete. But we can take some insight from these top performers and apply it to our own lives, to help achieve our goals.
Today I want to share with you how the simple tool of Habit Tracking can be used to turn exercise (or whatever you like) into your new daily habit.
What is a Habit Tracker
A habit tracker is a simple way to measure your progress while building a new habit.
The most basic format for a habit tracker is using a calendar and crossing off each day you perform an activity. Habit tracking is such a powerful tool because of three reasons:
It creates an obvious cue to remind you to perform the habit
It provides a visual representation of the progress you are making
It is rewarding to record your success.
By leveraging these three factors, habit tracking becomes an essential tool in making a good habit actually stick.
Habit trackers provide a visual cue to act
It is far too easy to ignore a good habit if you are not reminded of it, no matter how good your intentions are.
The first part of any habit is the cue. It tells our brain when a habit should start. Having a strong cue for a habit makes it almost impossible to ignore. That is why it is so easy to keep eating chocolate when every time you open the fridge it is staring right at you.
Using a habit tracker provides you with that visual cue for your desired habit. Let’s use the calendar example I mentioned earlier (you can get apps that allow you to track habits). Place the calendar somewhere you will see it every day. Every time you exercise, cross a date off on your calendar. Now every time you see that calendar, you will be reminded to act. Similar to opening your fridge and eating chocolate, but now you will be doing something far more productive.
The visual cue that Habit Trackers provide is so powerful that multiple studies looking into goals such as losing weight, quitting smoking, and lowering blood pressure have found that people who track their progress are more likely to improve than those who don’t. One study of more than 1600 participants tracking weight loss found that those who kept a daily food log lost double the amount of weight compared to those who didn’t.
From my experience in working with people with Chronic Low Back Pain (CLBP), those who track their rehab completion are far more likely to report better progress than those who don’t.
Habit trackers provide a visual representation of your progress
People often think that motivation is something you need to start a behaviour, but they are wrong.
The most effective form of building motivation is progress. When you succeed with something, you feel more motivated to do that action again.
But the progress achieved through exercise is something that happens in the distant future. Getting stronger takes time, running faster takes time, losing weight takes time, and recovering from CLBP takes time. That is the problem with focusing on the goal, the initial rush of motivation you get from starting an activity fades before you see any progress.
The beauty of using a Habit Tracker is that it provides a visual representation of your progress before you actually see any of the long-term outcomes usually associated with good habits. Now what happens is you shift your focus on the process of showing up consistently, instead of just focusing on the end goal.
By using a simple calendar to mark the days you performed your habit - be it going for a run, going to the gym, etc., you will start to build a chain of days on your calendar. Seeing your chain grow provides the motivation you need to keep turning up.
Habit tracking is a rewarding
How satisfying is it when you get to the end of your day and all the items on your to-do list are ticked off?
Just as it is motivating to see your chain of crosses grow on the calendar, the actual act of crossing off the calendar is just as satisfying in itself. The small reward of crossing off a day after completing the task releases a chemical in the brain known as dopamine. Dopamine is a key component in the pleasure pathway in the brain. The brain will now crave the act of crossing off a day on the calendar because it knows it will get a release of dopamine, thus feeling satisfied.
The satisfaction experienced by crossing a day in the calendar now becomes part of the cue to perform the action again. The brain will begin to crave the reward of marking the task as complete.
This is the beauty of using a habit tracker. You not only get a visual representation of your progress, but you also build motivation by seeing how long your chain is, and you get the satisfaction of ticking off each day, which then makes you want to do the whole thing again.
Habit tracking is simple, but be sure to pick the right tasks.
The key to Habit Tracking is picking a task that is simple enough that you can actually achieve it. If you can’t physically complete a task, there is no special habit tracker that will help you achieve your goals.
Say your goal is to overcome CLBP, it would be wonderful to perform rehab exercises for an hour every day, but would it be sustainable? It is hard enough to exercise for an hour a day without CLBP, then consider how your body would struggle to tolerate the increase in demand. The idea is on the right track, but the task is too difficult to perform.
So if the first step of picking the right task is to make sure you can do it, the second step is to make sure that the task you choose will produce a meaningful result. Again, if overcoming CLBP is our example, performing rehab exercises is a great idea. But what about researching the ideal posture for an hour a day? The task itself is sustainable, but would it help progress you towards your desired outcome? Likely not.
When choosing a new habit to track, you need to make sure it is easy enough to sustain, but also that it will provide meaningful progress towards your goal.
Habit tracking is a simple, yet powerful way to generate real change when starting a new habit.
You could use something as simple as a calendar, but if you sign up below I will send you the Habit Tracking template we provide in our Lower Back Programs. This tool will remind you to perform your new habit each day, seeing your progress will provide you with the motivation to keep going, and you will get a little boost each time you tick it off.
Happy habit tracking.
