Adherence Tracking

Adherence is the percentage of the plan you actually executed: sessions completed vs scheduled, nutrition days on-target, step-floor days hit, protein-target days met. It is a process / leading indicator (see Leading vs Lagging Indicators) — it changes first, whereas outcomes like bodyweight, strength, or FTP lag by weeks.

Why it deserves its own metric:

• It's the thing you control. You can't directly will the scale down, but you can hit 4-of-4 workouts and 6-of-7 nutrition days. Tracking the controllable behavior is more actionable and more motivating than tracking only the slow outcome.
• It diagnoses stalls. When an outcome stalls, the first question is always "was adherence actually there?" A flat fat-loss trend with 50% nutrition adherence isn't a metabolism problem — it's an adherence problem (see Calorie and Macro Logging).
• It compounds. Consistency, not perfection, drives long-term results; an 80%-adherence plan done for a year beats a perfect plan abandoned in three weeks (see Overcoming Barriers to Exercise).

Implementation: track simple streaks and weekly hit-rates (e.g. "5/6 training sessions," "6/7 protein days"), surface them on the dashboard, and frame goals around adherence behaviors, not just outcomes (see Goal-Setting with Metrics (SMART)). For programming, sustained low adherence is a signal the plan is too demanding and should be simplified, not pushed harder (see Applying Progressive Overload).

• Adherence = % of planned behaviors actually done (sessions, nutrition days, step floors).
• A leading/process indicator — moves before outcome metrics.
• First diagnostic for any stalled outcome: was adherence really there?
• Consistency beats perfection; ~80% sustained beats 100% abandoned.
• Track as streaks/weekly hit-rates; low adherence = simplify the plan, not push harder.