​To achieve any goal, you need to collect and analyse data.
 
Without it, you wouldn’t know
 

• If you’re making progress
• The rate at which you’re progressing
• What is working
• What is not working

 
In other words, without data, you can’t make the right adjustments to your plan.
 
You could still accomplish your goal, but you’d probably run into one of these two scenarios:
 

1. You can’t maintain the achieved results because you made excessively drastic decisions that you can’t sustain in the long term
2. You take an unnecessarily long time to reach your target because your decisions were too conservative

 
However, having data isn’t enough to secure effective and efficient results. Inconsistent and unreliable data, or data that you’re interpreting incorrectly, can be just as damaging as the absence of it.
 
For example, with fitness goals such as fat loss and muscle gain, a common mistake is to focus too much on day-to-day fluctuations on the scale, which are normal, and too little on your average weight increases or reductions over a longer period of time, which is what matters most for these fitness endeavours.
 
This multi-part article series will provide you with the knowledge to assess your bodyweight data in order to achieve fat loss or muscle gain.
 
In Part 1, we’ll delve into:
 

• Why you need to weigh yourself
• How to weigh yourself to get consistent and reliable data
• How to record and assess this data

 
In the rest of the series, we’ll cover how to adjust your diet and training protocol in response to changes in bodyweight.

Reflecting on the past two years of coaching people online and in person, I created a list of the advice that my clients have found most helpful in the pursuit of their goals, but that seems to be underrated in an online fitness space rife with detox teas and abs-blasting workouts.
 
This article breaks down these tips into the following categories:
 

1. Nutrition
2. Training
3. Habits
4. Mindset