Training diary, workout log, call it what you like, you really should record your exercise routine. Recently I was in the gym and after completing a set of exercises I lent against the wall to fill in my workout log and noticed someone else do the same. This was odd, usually I am the only person that I see doing this in the gym. And that is not the way it should be. Everyone should be recording their workouts. And in a very short, bullet point style, here is why:
- You can check your progress – how do you know you are progressing if you don’t know how much fat you have lost?
- It’s a great motivator – to see that you can now do 6 body weight pull ups when 4 weeks ago you couldn’t lift yourself off the ground once.
- Prevent injury – recently started getting a sore back? Perhaps it’s doing deadlifts 4 times a week…with a training log you can see what changed and when you started getting injured.
- Your memory is not perfect – last week I saw two guys talking about their bench press and they couldn’t remember what they did last week so just settled on a lower weight.
- You can monitor what works or doesn’t work for you.
There are many ways to keep a training log, you can download templates from the internet but I prefer just to write mine down in a note book. Each to their own.
Just write down what you do, how much you lift, how much rest, all of your warm up exercises and the date. The more details the better. If you want fat loss then why not write down your body measurements? I’ll save why record your waist line instead of your weight for another article.
You can read more about how to record the log here:
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