Dear Diary, Keeping a Workout Journal
You enter the gym and are about to start your next workout, what do you do? Do you start with some squats or presses? Do you go heavy or light? What about cardio?
To answer those questions, you may want to look to the past and ask yourself:
What did I do last time? How many sets and reps did I do for my exercises? How did it feel when I was doing? How long did I rest?
Don’t know the answer to those questions? Maybe you should keep a workout log or journal. We all have good intentions when it comes to remembering things, but then life gets in the way and forget. Let’s be honest, with jobs, families and a million other responsibilities, are you really going to remember the exact weight, reps, and rest for an exercise along with how you felt when you were doing it?
Maybe you will remember highlights. Especially if you were feeling great and you hit a personal best in an exercise. But, in general, the details of your workout will fade into the background of your life. What is the danger in that you ask?
The danger is that you will be repeating the same thing over and over, or, even worse, regressing. The simple tool of having your previous workouts written down allows you to see the direction you are headed and make adjustments based on where you’d like to be. Students and teachers track grades, stores track sales and inventory, scientists track data from experiments and studies. We track many things in life so we can make adjustments for the future. Your fitness should be no different.
If you go to your standard gym, you will likely see the vast majority of people without a plan, doing basically what they did last week and the week before. They get into a rut. They do not make any attempt to push themselves. Would you accept an investment that didn’t grow for a year? No, you’d made changes, invest money elsewhere. Did you start to workout with the objective of being the same in a year? Likely not. If you log your workouts, you will be able to go into a gym each and every day with a plan to make improvements upon your previous workout. The value in journaling is not in simple documenting what you did, it is in then using that documentation to plan for your next workout.
Can you add a rep? Or some weight? How about decreasing rest periods? What about improving your technique or how explosive you are with the repetition? It’s hard to adjust any of these variables without the data to show where you were previously. Also, while a workout log helps you to plan for success, reviewing your log from time to time can clue you in as to what behaviors were not successful. Notice a string of workouts where you failed to improve at all? Look for the commonalities; were you sick? stuck on a certain exercise? Joints hurting?
Many of my clients keep a food journal, often with My Fitness Pal. The food journal provides a similar tool for assessing and planning. Did your weight increase this week? Look at your journal, were there multiple days you were over your target calories? Did you binge right before the day you weighed yourself?
What if there wasn’t any bad days? What if you ate very well? This is where a food journal in conjunction with an exercise journal can be truly effective. Maybe your eating was spot on this week, but in reviewing your exercise journal, you see that you only worked out 1 day of the week. This would mean that you burned much less calories than a week when you worked out 4 days. This alone could be the cause of a body weight that stalls or even gains.
How do I go about logging my workout? The answer is limitless. You can go the old fashioned pen and paper if you’d like. Do you enjoy computers? You could make up a simple excel spreadsheet and enter your data there. Do you own a smartphone? There are numerous workout apps that allow you to log your workout. For example, My Fitness Pal allows you to make exercise notes along with your food diary.
Are you convinced yet? I hope so. When you invest your money, you monitor its performance to determine if the investment is good. You expect to see a return on your investment, not magically, but in direct relation to your effort to put your money in the right investments in the right amount for the right amount of time. Your workout journal is the way you monitor the investment you’ve made in your fitness. How valuable it is depends on what you are willing to document. It can be as simple as logging the exercise, weight and reps. To as detailed as making notes on how you felt that day, how long your rest periods were, any outside the gym influences that may have impacted the workout, etc.
Your workout journal tells you if you are investing your time and energy wisely. If you aren’t, it’s time to make a change.
