A Seven Day Wellness Challenge – Monitor the Best Personal metrics for personal
Changes over a short time, when monitored, can easily reveal trends and help decide how to approach the day. This is a series of daily metrics, with a challenge to measure and chart each one on a daily basis for 7 days.
This means more than just hitting 10,000 steps on your step tracker. It’s a bit to do the logging, although it can mostly be automated and ultimately the 10 minutes of input is a worthwhile investment.
This is more than just a day of health tracking, it is a way to begin to monitor trends of some of the most important wellness metrics you can monitor.
Start with Steps – The Easiest Activity to Track
The daily 10k challenge is known to so many. There is little to justify the 10,000 number, other than it being a round figure.
Steps is the genesis of daily tracking on a consumer basis. Fitbit, and others, popularized the steps metric with a relatively arbitrary, target of 10,000 in a day and others like Amazon Halo, Apple Watch, and others followed along.
An hour of daily cardio is another way to interpret this, as a proxy for activity output. This statistic also helps guide calories out, in the CICO aspect of nutrition tracking. So choose your favorite wearable and get counting.
One thing to consider here is that all step trackers are slightly different. Even something like wearing one on the other hand can change how many steps it calculates for you throughout the day. The 10k step recomendation is widely used, mostly because it is a round number. There is limited research to suggest there is anything magical about this value. You can also check out our articles that cover the accuracy of FitBit step tracking as well as the accuracy of Apple Watch for step tracking.
Daily Metabolism Reading – A Lumen Review
Lumen is one of the original personal health trackers to usebreath analysis for metabolic tracking. Target Zone 1-2, as measured in the morning to know that you have not over eaten in the night before and that your body has consumed all of the short term energy stores (ie. carbohydrates).
The output is simplified into a five point scale, with one being nearer to ketosis and a body that is burning all fat. Five is carb loading. The goal for the week is to have a morning reading that is 2 or below. With Lumen, their diet may not be the one that is followed, that can be tracked in other apps.
Check Your Resting Heart Rate Is At it’s Lowpoint
Over the course of the week the Apple Watch will automatically monitor heart rate. Seeing a rise can mean that your body is stressed. This can be due to sickness, lack of sleep, stress, or just variability within a range. Tracking for a week or two will help define a baseline for your personal range.
Everyone is different when it comes to resting heart rate. The goal should be to be within a few BPM of your low point which shows you have removed stressors and gotten relevant sleep. Your body will settle into its natural resting state. It is worth noting though that many factors that influence the resting heart rate can not be controlled on a one or two week time frame. Things like illness will impact it as the body fends off disease. We’ve also shown clear spikes in heart rate when traveling to altitude.
Weight Reduction of 1% a Week
Target is to reduce weight by 1.5 pounds over a seven day period, and 5 pounds in a month. A scale that automatically reports this just means spending <10 seconds a day standing on a scale. The importance of time of day, and weighing at the same point in your routine, is helpful. Weight varies day to day but it is still possible to see trends over a few days.
Most plans say that anything more than 1% body weight lost in a week is questionable. Week to week it is possible to loose more but that shouldn’t be the target.
Dozens of tools exist to help monitor weight loss. Our favorites are those that help follow the CICO method, or Calories In – Calories Out. Running in a calorie deficit over an extended period is THE way to monitor and reduce weight.
If you can get access to one, a lab based metabolic rate test is a sure fire way to determine what your maintenance calories are. We found in ours that the standard estimates were off from our lab measurements by hundreds of calories, which can quickly put a damper on a CICO plan that uses an assumption to track to a 250 calorie deficit (which in our case would still not be a deficit and would result in weight gained).
Of course simply tracking calories accurately with something like MyFitnessPal (see our review of the accuracy of their calorie estimates) covers the other side of the equation. Using this and a smart scale, like the Body+ made by Withings, helps get a sense for how your body is impacted by daily flucuations.
8 Hours of Sleep Tracking
Seven days of sleep tracked with a target of 8+ hours. This is an under looked area, but understanding what your sleep cycle is like, and working to extend the amount of deep sleep can help with recovery and daily fatigue. The goal with this is to avoid the things that cause you to stay up late, with no good payoff, and help to provide the energy to do everything else on the list.
With more than a third of the day targeted to sleep, having a routine for going to sleep is important. So is having a sleeping environment that is conducive to recovery and relaxation that can maximize deep sleep. A comfortable mattress or pillow can help, but ensuring this metric is monitored without disrupting sleep is also critical.
There are some great products to help track sleep. Most smart phones now have some type of reminders that will encourage you to put them down during times where you can be sleeping. We have also covered Amazon Halo bands and the Halo Rise for sleeping as well as using the Apple Watch to get the best sleep.
Do Pushup & Pullups (1000/200)
The best way to track this is often just a journal and a pen, and writing out tracking challenge goals can help reinforce the habits required to complete the one week challenge.
Finding a place to do pushups is simple, a pull-up bar can be harder to find. If you can hang things from a ceiling beam though, it’s possible to get a pull-up bar with only a single mounting point by using a climbing hang board. Of course the actual target number of pull ups and pushups to do in a day to get better can be tweaked to your personal preference. We just prefer large round numbers.
The goal of course is to build out a more routine habit. One that can be monitored daily using even a simple tool like those we covered in the Guide to using Google Sheets for Fitness tracking.
Can You Hold Your Breath For 1 Minute?
Stamina App helps train for holding your breath. As a swimmer this can be helpful. It’s a neat party trick, assuming you wind up at a pool, but also can be thought of as training for the lungs.
The tracking challenge for the week is to do a daily training set, and hold your breath for at least 60 seconds at least one time.
Stay Hydrated and Monitor Hydration
Staying hydrated is likely the best general advice, alongside getting more sleep, for feeling good throughout the day. Some other challenges have a targeted quantity of water to drink. This is hard to add to the tracking challenge without a reliable water bottle or other way to measure volumes before you take a sip.
As a minimum though two 64 oz bottles, including one before 10am, is the daily target. There are smart water bottles to help with this including the PUL Hydration bottle cap. The analog version still is a wonderful option to track how many ounces of water you drink per day.