From Joe: What equipment is absolutely indispensable to you when starting a new diet or fitness regimen? Do you need free weights? Special apps for the phone so you can count calories? A heart rate monitor? A treadmill? Elaborate progressive resistance machines? Or, that perennial favorite, a fancy new set of gym clothes?
All that stuff is nice. But indispensable? Maybe not.
For most of my adult life, I’ve spent 7 to 10 hours a week in gyms. All kinds of training fads and equipment fetishes came and went. Throughout it all, one apparatus remained perpetually useful.
It’s the humble pen and notebook set! Used well, these items will help you achieve your goals no matter what other stuff you have or lack. Disrespect them and progress towards your goals could be seriously jeopardized. That’s enough to get them my vote for being indispensable fitness equipment!
It’s very difficult to plan and execute effectively if you don’t have accurate, detailed information about how ongoing achievements compare with long term goals. In physical fitness as in other areas of life, accurate, appropriately detailed feedback is critical to success.
Unfortunately, our memory systems are unpredictable when it comes to dealing with such data. When they’re bad, they can be really bad. When they’re good, they’re amazing.
Rather than cataloguing details accurately and permanently, memory constantly reconstructs past events. It makes information fit into evolving patterns – the gists. Eventually, the patterns themselves can revise the retained information until it no longer faithfully represents the actual event. This is well documented by cognitive science.
Simultaneously, when emotional, motivational and cognitive factors effectively work together, masses of data can be remembered accurately. This too is well documented by cognitive science.
The practical problem is that, in advance, you just never know how well your memory will retain any particular bit of information!
That’s why the experts at Push Fitness are on solid ground when they advise clients to keep a journal about diet and fitness regimens. The Devil’s in the details and memory alone might not confront him successfully!
Remember that when you overconfidently “remember” how much you ate or how fast you ran last week.
Did you journal it?
I agree with you Joe. Thank goodness for my diet & exercise journal! I carry it with me everywhere I go. If I had to rely on my memory, I have little doubt I’d “accidentally” under report my food intake.