Current Article

Stanford Pedometer Study Shows Tracking Your Goals Brings Extraordinary Results

By Jill on Nov 20, 2007 in Featured, Goals, Time Management, discipline, focus, productivity, results, success, time managment

In the November 6th Lesson of Goal University, we examined how to create Success Systems for tracking your top Goals.

The more meaningful your Goal is, the more essential it is to track your progress. You can’t improve what you don’t measure.

There are multiple benefits of measuring your results from the beginning of any endeavor:

1. Seeing your progress and having the proof of positive results builds confidence.

2. Tracking gives you valuable feedback so that you can modify your plan or change your approach if it’s not moving you in a satisfactory direction or speed.

Once your attention is placed upon a specific target, your conscious and subconscious mind work like heat seeking missiles in the quest to achieve it.

People who use a pedometer to measure how far they walk lose more weight, exercise more and have lower blood pressure than those who do not, researchers said on Tuesday.

It was not clear from the study, the first to review most previously published research on pedometer use, whether those who use the devices are more motivated in the first place, just benefit from the assistance, or both.

Many pedometer-related programs recommend users set daily goals for themselves, such as 10,000 steps or about 5 miles (8 km).

Dr. Dena Bravata and colleagues at Stanford University in California reviewed 26 earlier studies covering 2,767 people, with an average age of 49.

It found that pedometer users took more than 2,000 extra steps a day compared to those who did not use the devices, and that having a goal of reaching a certain number of steps was a significant factor.

Those using the devices, which are worn on the hip, also lost weight as measured by body mass index, and significantly reduced their systolic blood pressure — the top number in blood pressure readings, which indicates the maximum pressure of a contracting heart.

“Our results suggest that the use of these small, relatively inexpensive devices is associated with significant increases in physical activity and improvements in some key health outcomes, at least in the short term,” Bravata’s team wrote in the report published in this week’s Journal of the American Medical Association.