Key To Achieving Wellness? “Tracking” Progress
Wellness is an essential objective for us all, regardless of whether you’re young, old, or in the middle.The key to achieving wellness is creating an integrative approach that focuses on nutrition, exercise, meditation, and recovery. The balancing act of these criteria is how wellness is achieved; which is easier said than done. So how do you know if you are on your way?
First you need to have a plan captured in a diary, a sticky on your bathroom mirror, or in your phone notes. Make sure it’s written down; this is fundamental. Additionally, it needs to be placed where you can regularly see it and worded in a specific, non open-ended way. Framing your plan as a “smart goal” is a fundamental key to success.
Once your goals are phrased correctly, going out daily and attacking this plan’s objectives, you will undoubtedly feel better because you are active and focused on something that has the potential to change your life for the better. Is this enough? For some, it can be, but in 2021 there are also so many tools that can aid in the execution of your wellness plan.
Apple, for example, has evolved its i-products in a way that helps users track their activity goals with their proprietary fitness software. Inside the Apple ecosystem, you have access to countless apps specialized in helping users with different elements of their wellness journey. These range from sleep tracking to exercise monitoring and everything in between.
Nutrition is also a crucial element of wellness. The discipline of tracking your dietary consumption is the beginning of this process because it keeps you honest in knowing precisely what you are putting in your body daily. One app that I have found enormously helpful is MyFitnessPal, an easy-to-use app that tracks nutritional intake each day. This information gets even more powerful by integrating MyFitnessPal with your other health apps that monitor exercise and sleep.
Another product that has been very helpful to me is Whoop, a company that’s created a wearable piece of technology developed by some very talented people in Boston. The Whoop band has received much acclaim serving top athletes and teams that wanted to enhance their performance by emphasizing recovery. Without proper recovery, people can’t be at their best the next day. If they’re not at their best, that negatively impacts their efforts in the gym, at the office, in school, or even socially. It just so happens that the same data elements that drive high-performance athletes are also crucial to high-performance workers, families, and recreational weekend warriors.
Whoop has taught me important lessons about how my body works and recovers by monitoring my fitness activity 24 hours a day and providing comprehensive information for how I can improve for the better. It’s been an invaluable piece of the puzzle for me.
One additional side benefit of using Whoop has come during this COVID era, through the integration of a new metric called “Respiratory Rate”. Every day the community of Whoop users captures a great deal of data on many health attributes. It was determined that if Whoop users had a rise in their respiratory rate above their personal “normal” ranges, it could be a sign of a potential COVID infection. In fact, this rise in respiratory rater tracked by Whoop occurred before any other known symptom. Needless to say, I have been paying close attention to my respiratory rate as we have all been dealing with the COVID pandemic.
The key to any wellness plan is a combination of integrated approaches that complement each other. We must commit to the program, and it has never been easier to make this happen. Wearable technology and fitness applications will not give you success alone. It has to also come through hard work, but these tools we have available to us make it that much easier because they allow you to see the positive changes you are making in real-time with objective metrics.
Today is your first day on the road to wellness, so don’t squander it. Take a look at all of the available tools to help you build an integrative wellness program that is best for you. Good luck!
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Tracey B
What a great article! I’m definitively going to start using my Apple Watch in a more productive way. Thank you!