HLTH 4300 Week 11 Term Retrospective Example

Eleven Weeks From Baseline: What Janelle's Week 6 Plan Promised, What Her Tracking Record Shows, Why Each Difference Arose and What Shrinking a National Guideline to One Life Required

Student Name

Walden University

HLTH 4300: Personal Health and Wellness

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Eleven Weeks From Baseline: What Janelle's Week 6 Plan Promised, What Her Tracking Record Shows, Why Each Difference Arose and What Shrinking a National Guideline to One Life Required

The Comparison

Eleven weeks ago, Janelle's baseline week held a little over an hour of moderate activity, none of it on workdays, and about 13 hours of sitting on each workday. Her week 6 plan promised three 20-minute workday walks on the lit Cedar Park loop each day-shift week, plus a 30-minute Saturday walk, about 90 minutes a week. Her tracking record covers six weeks of that plan. This retrospective measures the difference between the plan and the record and explains each part of it.

Plan Versus Record

Table 1

What the Plan Promised and What the Record Shows

Plan figures come from the week 6 plan; record figures come from the week 9 tracking summary.

Explaining Each Difference

Workday Walks

Three workday walks did not happen. Two followed overtime days, when Janelle left work after 5:45 and reached the park after dark with her son about to arrive home; the plan's Thursday spare covered one other overtime day but could not cover two in one week. One followed a day when she drove home a different way to collect a prescription, missing the park exit, which was her prompt. Each miss traces to the prompt or the time window, not to reluctance, which matches the pattern in her first log, where walks happened when the cue worked and did not when it was disrupted.

Two further walks are uncertain, one with calendar evidence only and one with no record at all. These are gaps in measurement rather than in behavior, and the tracking summary treated them separately for that reason.

Saturday Walks

The one missed Saturday was the day her son was ill. The setback plan had anticipated this, and Janelle recorded it as a lapse rather than a failure, as the relapse prevention approach recommends (Marlatt & George, 1984). She walked the following Saturday.

Minutes

The plan assumed 20-minute walks would add up to 90 minutes a week with Saturdays. Confirmed walks averaged a little over 20 minutes, but fewer walks than planned brought the weekly figure to about 70 minutes.

The Total Compared With Baseline

The most surprising difference is in the total. At baseline, all of Janelle's moderate activity, about an hour a week, came on days off. Her record now shows about 70 minutes of planned walking, much of it on workdays, but she reports fewer long weekend outings than in September, partly because of weather and her son's soccer season. The plan moved activity into workdays more than it raised the weekly total. That is still a meaningful change for someone whose workdays had no activity at all, but it is not the gain the plan implied.

What Shrinking a National Guideline to One Life Required

The federal guidance names a weekly floor of 150 moderate minutes, with strength work on two days (Piercy et al., 2018). Applying that to Janelle required four steps the national figure does not mention.

It required finding her actual time. The guideline is a weekly total; Janelle's week contained one usable 50-minute window on workdays, discovered only from her log.

It required a goal smaller than the guideline. Her goal covered about 90 minutes and no strengthening, and her record reached about 70. A goal set at the full national minimum would have been further from what she could do and might have led to abandoning the effort.

It required designing around barriers outside her control: an employer's overtime rule and a street without lights. The ecological view of health behavior places such barriers at the organizational and community levels, beyond individual resolve (McLeroy et al., 1988).

And it required building a habit, not just a resolution. Her automaticity score more than doubled over six weeks, reaching the midpoint of its scale, consistent with research showing that habits form gradually through repetition in a stable context (Lally et al., 2010), and her January shift change will require starting a new habit in a new context.

What Would Change in the Next Plan

The record points to three changes for the next plan. First, a backup prompt for days when her route changes, such as a phone reminder tied to her location, so that a detour does not erase the walk. Second, a plan for days off that attaches walking to errands she already runs, since the record suggests weekend activity fell rather than rose. Third, a new cue for the January rotation, built before the rotation starts. Each change comes from a specific difference between plan and record, not from a general wish to do more.

What the Term Shows

The honest summary is that Janelle's plan worked partly. It moved activity into the part of her week where there had been none, and it began a habit. It did not bring her to the national minimum, and the record suggests it may have displaced some weekend activity rather than adding to it. Those findings are useful: they show where the next plan needs to work, on days off and on the January schedule.

Conclusion

Over eleven weeks, Janelle's week 6 plan promised about 90 minutes of walking a week, and her record shows about 70, with each shortfall traceable to overtime, a missed prompt or a sick child. Shrinking the national guideline to her life required finding her real time, setting a smaller goal, designing around barriers she could not remove and treating the walk as a habit to be built. The gap between plan and record is the most useful thing the term produced, because it shows exactly where the next plan has to begin.

References

Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998-1009. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.674

Marlatt, G. A., & George, W. H. (1984). Relapse prevention: Introduction and overview of the model. British Journal of Addiction, 79(3), 261-273. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1360-0443.1984.tb00274.x

McLeroy, K. R., Bibeau, D., Steckler, A., & Glanz, K. (1988). An ecological perspective on health promotion programs. Health Education Quarterly, 15(4), 351-377. https://doi.org/10.1177/109019818801500401

Piercy, K. L., Troiano, R. P., Ballard, R. M., Carlson, S. A., Fulton, J. E., Galuska, D. A., George, S. M., & Olson, R. D. (2018). The Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans. JAMA, 320(19), 2020-2028. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2018.14854