There are a number of ways to record your fitness and diet progress. From apps on your phone to digital journals, modern technology offers many paperless ways to keep track of what you’re doing to build your physical fitness. However, some choose to go the route of fitness blogging instead.
Is it the equivalent of opening your journal and showing it to the world? Not necessarily. But there are some potential advantages to fitness blogging over fitness journals. You don’t have to share everything from your fitness journal but sharing parts of it and other knowledge you gain along the way with other people not only benefits them but has some clear advantages for you.
Here are five of those advantages, and reasons why fitness blogging may be superior to fitness journaling.
It Helps Keep You Accountable
Keeping things to yourself means that you are the only one who knows if you met your goals or not. If you skipped a workout, no one knows it but you unless you share that information with others. Sharing that information on your own domain name, with your own blog makes you accountable not only to yourself or your close friends, but others as well.
The more people you are accountable to, the more likely it is that you will achieve your fitness goals. So making your goals public through blogging allows your entire blog audience to hold you to them. This does mean that to make fitness blogging effective for accountability, you need to be transparent.
The advantage if you are transparent and allow others to hold you accountable is that they can not only hold you to your goals when you struggle, but they can encourage you when you fail.
It Helps You Build a Community
Of course, the accountability you receive will be even better if you have a larger community. A blog allows you to build a group of like-minded individuals who will not only support you and hold you to your goals, but who will share their insights with you and allow you to share yours with them.
From comments to contributing blog posts and content, your community will make your message stronger and even influence your workouts, your diet, and the way you pursue fitness. The truth is that no one is so much of an expert that they don’t have something to learn, so there is strength in numbers and community when it comes to spreading knowledge and debunking falsehoods and trend diets and workouts.
The community you build makes your fitness blog infinitely more valuable than just a fitness journal.
It Helps You Help Others
Nothing is more rewarding than helping others and helping other people achieve their fitness goals through a fitness blog can literally change their life and that of those around them. If you have engaged in your own fitness journey, you know the impact it has.
While you might not be an expert, the community you build will have experts. Besides, the accountability you get will extend to those who join your community, and often that is enough to keep someone on track building new habits and encouraging them to make changes.
Making a difference to others can also motivate you when the work of maintaining a fitness blog becomes difficult, or when you are discouraged yourself. Those same people you encourage often turn into your greatest cheerleaders when you need them the most.
It Helps You Keep Good Records
Can a fitness app or a digital journal help you keep good records of your fitness progress? Absolutely, but with a blog and the redundant backups that often come along with it, your data and your records will not only be thorough, but safe from being erased or deleted if you stop using a certain app or have to switch to another one.
Another advantage? Your personal data is as secure as your own blog security (and you need to take that security seriously). With new GDPR rules, your information and that of all your subscribers, commenters and followers will remain private from all but the most determined of hackers, so you can feel good about storing your data there.
You can also anonymize the data you post publicly, keeping your age, location, address, and other information away from prying eyes. Just be careful when synching apps like Strava that show your location on map. Most have an option of not showing the data within a certain distance of you home, and you can enable the same settings using plugins on your site.
Good, thorough records let you and others see where you have been, and determine where you are going.
It Keeps Your Mind Sharp
One of the best exercises you can do for your brain is to write. Another is to do research and learn about new things. Running a blog requires that you do some of both these things. The key to fitness is really setting up good habits and having determination and willpower.
That determination and willpower comes from your brain, and you need a healthy brain to have a healthy body. Staying mentally sharp is a vital part of physical fitness along with helping others and keeping them accountable.
Fitness journals are great, and not everyone wants or needs to take the extra step to start a fitness blog. But those who do have advantages, and the benefits often make the effort worth it.