How Fitness Accountability Can Take Your Workouts to the Next Level: Expert Tips

Why Fitness Accountability is Essential for Long-Term Success: Fitness Experts share their Tips

We are all prioritising our health and fitness far more than we used to, and our hearts and minds are thanking us for it.

There is, however, always that nagging feeling that you are not doing enough, or in some cases not doing enough.

How can you hold yourself accountable for your fitness and stop blaming others or making excuses?

We asked several fitness experts for their 3 tips regarding fitness accountability, which we hope you use to improve your workouts and live a happier, healthier life.

Check out these accountability tips from our fitness experts.

Matt Claes from Weightloss made Practical

1. The first tip is to tell your friends and family that your goal is to improve your physical health.

Humans are social animals which leads to a variety of biases that make this tip more effective than keeping your new fitness goals to yourself.

For example, there is the consistency bias where humans find it easier to do things they already did or said.

By telling your friends and family about your fitness goals, you add a negative feeling to skipping your workouts which can benefit your consistency.

2. Create a consistency calendar for yourself.

The way this works is that you create a digital sheet or piece of paper where you put a cross on each day you do certain healthy habits.

It becomes a lot harder to break your healthy habits if it means ending your success streak of multiple days or months.

3. I really like writing down all the bad things that will happen if you skip your healthy habits and all the good things that will happen if you stay consistent.

This can give you a lot of emotional leverage.

All of the sudden, "just skipping one workout" becomes something like increasing your risk of all these negative conditions and not being able to play with your children/grandchildren.

In turn, this makes it harder to skip your healthy habits and helps you stay accountable for your own health.

Matt Claes is the head coach and founder of Weight Loss Made Practical - A personal coaching company that helps busy people lose weight and keep it off.

Jordi Sadurni from JS Cycling Training

1. For me the first and easiest tip for increasing accountability with your training is to hire a coach.

A coach will be someone who you will have to report everything you do training-wise so that will help make you more accountable, and with time, build a training habit so that training becomes part of your routine and you don't have to push so hard mentally to exercise. 

2. The Second tip is to set goals.

These goals could be anything with a relationship to the exercise. Like running a certain distance or a certain speed, doing more reps of an exercise, losing x pounds of bodyweight or exercising x days per week. These goals should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely), so that you can track progress and see if you are on the good track.

3. Share your training ambitions with those close to you

The third tip is to share your training ambitions and goals with your relatives so that they also become part of the process and can push you when you are having rough times. 

Jordi Sadurni is a Sports Science graduate with a master’s in High Performance in Cyclic Sports. I have over three years of experience coaching athletes. I'm the founder of JS Cycling Training where I work as a cycling coach and personal strength trainer.

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Allison Sizemore from Couture Fitness Coaching

When it comes to making lasting habits that will help you lose body fat and get healthier in general, accountability is a huge component of this puzzle. 

If you want to make lasting changes, it can be very helpful (depending on your personality type) to have some sort of external accountability. 

1. Track your data

As coaches in the nutrition and fitness space, we have found that clients who fill out some sort of tracking data every single day (whether this is tracking food, logging workouts, and/or weighing themselves) are significantly more likely to be successful.

Just the act of knowing they are going to have to write down what they did each day can make them more likely to stick with the program. 

2. Have a coach look over your data

Additionally, knowing a coach is going to be looking at this data and possibly making changes based on what the data is telling them adds an additional layer of accountability. 

3. Make your good habits sustainable

Finally, figuring out how to make habits sustainable for life is key.  If you are only able to stick with something for a few months because it is so difficult, you are not likely to be successful long-term.

Allison Sizemore is a Certified Sports Nutritionist and Online Fitness Coach with Couture Fitness Coaching

Kat De Camillo from Katapocal Lifts Health & Fitness

1. Scheduling. 

Scheduling your workouts or training sessions can help make sure you have time.

A lot of people find it easier to schedule morning sessions before the rest of the day starts to spill over or your friends can convince you to hit happy hour with them.

If you are an afternoon or evening exerciser, blocking it out in your schedule means you are prioritizing your fitness and knocking out any excuses relating to not having time.

2. Enrol a workout buddy or partner to help stay on track.

Pick someone who is reliable, has similar goals to yours and that you enjoy hanging out with so you can both keep each other on track.

You might consider creating a routine with your significant other or, if all else fails, look for a group on a site like Meetup or to find people with similar interests. Keeping a social circle around fitness can help you stick to it. You won't want to let your friends down!

3. Put your money where your mouth is.

Spending money can be a great external motivator.

Paying for classes or hiring a trainer, especially a good one, can be great for accountability. I have clients that will tell me they are spending the money because they are cheap and it will ensure they show up.

If you do opt to hire a personal trainer, look for someone who works privately or in a smaller private gym.

You will have more of a personal relationship with them because they are adequately compensated, have likely been a trainer for a while and have a number of clients they can handle.

Big box gyms tend to hire very green trainers who just need to get experience under their belt, they are unlikely to go above and beyond because they are paid a minimum hourly rate and they are likely overloaded

Kat De Camillo is a Certified Personal Trainer with Katapoca Lifts Health & Fitness

Nick Mitchell from Ultimate Performance Los Angeles. 

1. Track everything you eat

By far the most common reason you’re not seeing results despite hours slaving away in the gym is that you’re not holding yourself accountable to your diet.  

Far too many either overcomplicate their diet or fail to grasp the fundamentals when trying to get in shape. In order to lose fat (and losing fat is NOT the same as losing weight) and build muscle to achieve that lean, muscular look, you need to be in a calorie deficit and base your diet around high-protein foods. 

Time after time, people come to me and say: “I work out every day but I’m still overweight: why?” But when I ask them to show me their food diary, they look at me blankly. 

Despite hours in the gym, far too many people do not pay sufficient attention to their diet. They consume too many calories every day and make poor decisions when it comes to food.

You might have heard the expressions: “Abs are made in the kitchen” or “You can’t out-train a bad diet”.  As cliched as those phrases are, they are also true. It doesn’t matter how many reps you crank out in the gym, if your diet is not on point, you’ll never shift the fat.

Try to keep it simple and keep this at the forefront of your mind: In order to lose fat, you need to be in a calorie deficit. Eating a high-protein diet whilst weight training will signal your body to tap into your fat stores, not your muscle mass, whilst fuelling the growth of your muscle cells. 

Here’s where you also need to be brutally honest when you look in the mirror. Is your diet optimal for building muscle and losing fat? Are you sticking to your diet, day after day and avoiding temptations, or do you slack off with your food choices at weekends?

Look at it another way. Let’s say your overall calorie target for a week is 13,400 calories. And Monday through to Friday you stick to your diet so you decide you can reward yourself with a ‘treat/cheat’ meal at the weekend. That turns into a bit of an eating binge, but you convince yourself that because you’ve dieted for five days, it won’t matter. 

Wrong. That binge is likely to contain so many calories that it undoes all the good work you’ve done in the week and takes you into a calorie SURPLUS for the week, so you end up putting on weight, which is pretty soul-destroying. 

Beware of hidden calories as well! You might seem like you’re eating well by having chicken and salad every night, but if you’re smothering your salad in sauces and dressings, all those hidden calories will quickly add up. 

So, the best thing you can do to remain accountable to yourself when it comes to your diet is to track absolutely every morsel of food you put into your mouth.

Set yourself daily and weekly calorie targets, work out how much protein, fats, and carbohydrates you should be consuming on a daily basis, and stick religiously to them. It will take patience, sacrifice, and discipline, but if you do, you will see results. 

Working out your calorie targets and macronutrient targets is not an exact science, as everyone is different.

I would recommend you use an app such as UP Transform, which does all the thinking for you. Based on your current body fat levels and the look you want to achieve, it will calculate your daily calorie and macronutrient targets, as well as suggested foods to eat.

That way, you don’t need to tie yourself up in knots trying to work out how much food you should eat and how much protein, fats and carbs are in each bite, the app will do it for you. All you need to do is stick to your targets!”

2. Keep a record of every performance in the gym, and try to go one better next session

A common mistake I see is that people stick to the same volume of weights for every workout. There’s no progression. 

In order to achieve hypertrophy – a word the fitness industry uses which refers to increasing the size of your muscles – you need to constantly challenge your body with progressively heavy weights. If you’re not forcing your body to adapt to the challenge of lifting progressively heavier weights, you’re not giving your body the stimulus to get stronger. 

I have seen people who stroll into the gym, press 10kg dumbbells over their heads for four sets of eight reps without breaking a sweat, and then put the dumbbells back on the rack. They do exactly the same workout with exactly the same weight three times a week, then wonder why they’re getting nowhere!  

Ideally, to build strength, you should look to add a little bit more weight to each lift, each time you hit the gym. This is what we call progressive overloading. Adding a little bit more weight every time – so long as you can maintain perfect form – is the best way to build up your strength. 

To keep yourself accountable, get yourself a logbook and record your performance on the gym floor, every session.

Make a note of the weight you’ve lifted for each exercise, the amount of reps and sets you’ve managed, the tempo of your lifts, where you’ve failed, how your body feels etc.

When you come to repeat that workout during your next session, try to make small but noticeable gains. Use your logbook to try and make small improvements – whether it’s a slightly increased weight, one or two more reps, more time spent under tension etc.

You’d be amazed at how your body will change for the better if you keep yourself and your performance on the gym floor accountable in this way.

3. Set yourself a plan, and stick to it!

Building your dream body is hard work. It takes patience, determination, sacrifice, gritting your teeth and turning down those trips to the pub or the doughnuts being passed around the office. 

It takes time and commitment.

If it was easy to achieve, everyone would look like Zac Efron, right? 

One of the most common mistakes I see is that people flip-flop from exercise program to exercise program. Here’s a common scenario: 

Many people see progress in their first month, but then they plateau.

All the time, I get questions such as: ‘I’ve lost some weight, but I can’t get rid of this last bit of stubborn fat’. And so they ditch their original programme, and start bouncing around from faddy diet to faddy diet, exercise programme to exercise programme, with no results. And then they give up. 

There is no such thing as stubborn fat. It has no personality.

What is really going to shed the remaining fat is remaining committed and disciplined. It’s a harsh, but true, fact that many people lack the patience and discipline to stick to their programme and their diet.

Fat will only come off so fast, so I would advise people to set realistic expectations. It takes time – stick to your plan, stick to your diet, and stay disciplined, and you will see results. In order to get the body you want, you’re going to have to go through some level of pain. So, commitment and determination are absolutely key – don’t give up at the first hurdle. 

In order to keep yourself accountable to these principles, draw up a proper, well-structured workout plan that lasts at least 12 weeks. 

This is not a criticism, but many people lack the skills and knowledge to put together an effective fitness plan. The temptation is to go on Google, bombard yourself with information that’s either misleading or just plain wrong, and end up with a fitness and diet programme that isn’t right for you.

This is where an experienced, knowledgeable personal trainer can help. They can write an exercise programme that is right for you, and one which constantly evolves to combat those dreaded plateaus and when your calories need tweaking. 

Yes, it’s an expense, but if you really want to achieve the body you’ve always dreamed of, it’s the best investment you can make.

Nick Mitchell, is the Founder and Global CEO of Ultimate Performance Los Angeles.

Hopefully, these Fitness Accountability Tips Can Help You Out

We don’t normally do these roundup types of articles, but frankly, 4 heads are better than one when it comes to offering advice, especially where your health is concerned.

If you hold yourself accountable, there can be no higher standard set. Make sure you enjoy your time getting fit and healthy by choosing sports or fitness activities that are right for you. Embrace those endorphins and give yourself a pat on the back occasionally.

Let us know in the comments if you have any other ideas our readers should know about.