5 Ways to Make the Most of Your Training Journal

The workout journal is one of the most powerful weapons athletes and gym-goers can unleash in order to get more from their training.

The benefits of using a log book have been proven and are well known: it will help you stay motivated, keep you accountable, and better plan and chart progression and improvement.

Here are some tips for how to make the most of your workout log book so that you can maximize the results for time spent writing out your sessions in the gym.

1. Write out the results ASAP. We all love to think that our memory is pristine, perfect, and our recall flawless. As a result, we don’t fret about writing things down right away when it comes to logging our practices and training sessions. Writing down your workouts as soon as you have completed them will insure that you have an accurate history on hand. When you consider how much there is to remember (sets, reps, weights, etc etc) it’s understandable that our memory can get a little fuzzy and muddled. Keep your training journal or app on hand when you are working out and you will end up with a clear workout history to work with.

2. Use it to plan your workouts. One of the most underrated aspects of keeping a workout log book is the ability to plan out your workouts ahead of time. Intuitively this makes sense—whenever you plan what you are going to do you tend to be more ambitious with your workouts. The moment we walk through the doors of the gym our brains naturally start to hedge our effort (“Oh, let’s take it easy today—we can always come back tomorrow and work harder”). Amateurs go to the gym and do what they “feel like” that day. Pros go in with a clear and focused plan in mind for their training.

3. Track lifestyle stuff. Want to take your results in the gym to the next level? Start tracking the influencing factors outside of weight room. How much you slept, how well you are eating, and how stressed you are all play a massive role in determining how our workouts are going to go that day. The connection isn’t always as clear as we think it should be—seeing that you only slept for four hours last night, and the resulting crap workout you subsequently had—won’t necessarily fix those bad sleeping habits, but will give you the incentive to at least try.

4. Don’t go overboard with details. Whenever working with a new athlete I ask them to journal their workouts for a couple weeks. Often, they will come back with a thick binder full of excruciating detail. While having a metric butt-ton of information on every aspect of your workout plan is helpful, it makes the habit of journaling your workouts harder to sustain. Stick to measuring the high impact stuff to start out with, and as you develop your own journaling style you will see what works best for you and your workouts.

5. Reflect. Going beyond your workout can be helpful in managing stress and gaining some much-needed perspective in these turbulent times. I’ve always used my workout log to not only talk about the broader aspects of my training (where I am in relation to upcoming competitions, changes I would like to make to my regimen in the future, how I felt under the bar that day, etc), but let mentally loose on stuff that might be bothering me as well. Having a few moments to empty out your brain, whether it’s listing a couple quick things you are grateful for, helps you to keep perspective during those long bouts of training when you aren’t seeing results as fast as you might like.