Fitness Obstacle: Feedback May 19, 2006
This post is part of the Fitness Obstacles series.
Any new form of exercise will be interesting for a while, as you master new skills and learn new techniques to perform it. Without some form of feedback, though, your exercise sessions begin to feel repetitive. You’re just going through the motions, repeating the same activities, and don’t feel like you’re making any progress. You begin to question the whole point of doing the exercise to begin with.
I find I need some kind of scoring system to measure my progress. Maybe it’s your personal best for lifting weights, your time to run 5 km (3 miles), your lap time for swimming, or the distance you can cycle in 30 minutes. Your body weight or measurements can be effective as a score, if you’re taking up exercise with weight loss or body shaping in mind. Whatever the scoring system, keeping track of your performance and seeing it improve is a very motivating thing.
The feedback problem is a longer-term version of the boredom problem.
For any single exercise session, boredom will hinder you getting started and can cause you to stop early. Over a longer term, a lack of feedback will cause your motivation to decline and your exercise routine to become stale and seem pointless.
When an activity is both boring and lacks feedback, you’ll dread it and have very little motivation for the next session. Boredom leads to skipping individual sessions, and lack of feedback or progress leads to dropping the whole routine.
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- Posted in : Fitness Obstacles
- Author : admin
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