“Dear diary, today I went to the gym and had a great workout. Rob the receptionist seemed to be in a good mood and complimented me on my new shirt as I entered. Luke and Sarah were there. Sarah is still trying to tone up but the stressful situation at work is really interfering with her efforts...”
OK, I’ll be honest, I’ve never seen a training diary entry like this before. While such an entry may provide an entertaining read several months down the line when you revisit it, such diary usage doesn’t really help us all that much from an actual functional usefulness standpoint.
Upon any mention of keeping some sort of diary, why do I still see images of young girls during Victorian times in their pyjamas and night caps filling out their journals at their bedside desks by candlelight? Had I been able to surpass this reluctance to keep written records of everything I do in the gym, certainly from a sporting performance perspective, I am convinced I could have achieved so much more.
This is because the type of diary I’m talking about isn’t the Victorian dramatic type. It’s a vital and indispensable tool in the arsenal of any fitness enthusiast or person interested in quickly and efficiently achieving their fitness or sporting goals.
A training diary is a record of all your efforts: every workout, in every detail. My efforts to maintain written records over the years have been mediocre at best. Indeed, whenever I’ve made progress, it has been through identifying things that seem to be working in my programme at any moment in time, but without written records. Our ability to make such accurate identifications is severely impaired. This is one of those “If I could do it all over again” moments where I wished I had made better use of training diaries.
It could take the form of a compact hard-back booklet, notepad or smartphone app you fill out there and then as you go along. It could even be a detailed spreadsheet on your laptop or PC that you fill out later upon completion of your session.
When the weights you lift or the intensities and durations you exploit seem to get stuck over time or even drop off, you can indulge in a little troubleshooting and find out why
Whichever format it takes, your diary should include the basic facts about your workout. The date, time and goal of the session are the first essential items of information to include, followed by the exercises and activities themselves, and every weight, set and repetition performed in the case of resistance training, or every minute, level, speed and gradient in the case of cardiovascular training. You should also log how long your workout took timewise overall.
A mood and energy level assessment is also useful to include. I’ve seen some people represent mood simply using a smiley faces depicting various expressions, and energy levels as a bar with values from zero to ten just as you might see in a video game. Include also a quick note of what you ate before the session, and when you ate it. Any other factor that you feel may affect your workout either positively or negatively should also be included.
It might sound like a lot of information and you might even feel this whole process would just take too long. If you have five to ten minutes to spare upon completion of your workout to do it then that’s great, but if you don’t, you can opt for the more popular fill-out-as-you-go-along option. This doesn’t have to take any additional time because updates can be made while resting between sets or exercises.
Everybody who exercises will benefit from using a training diary, because it’s effectiveness depends on how you interpret the data you have gathered. Think like a scientist. All data that affects your workout is relevant, and the various factors you recorded could be interacting with each other in a number of ways, producing either a positive or negative outcome on your training results. Looking through your entries you can learn a lot about what works for you and what doesn’t.
When the weights you lift or the intensities and durations you exploit seem to get stuck over time or even drop off, you can indulge in a little troubleshooting and find out why. Perhaps you might notice there is less rest between your workouts, or you are spending more time training than you used to. Perhaps you might spot a correlation between a certain type of pre-workout snack and high energy levels. If your performance in the gym is improving, then you know the programme is working and you can strive to maintain similar conditions. Where performance drops you can adapt according to the variables you have identified by process of elimination. For example mood may or may not have an impact on your performance, but you can only deduce this by looking at the mood assessments and performance levels over time.
You may find that drops in performance are usually preceeded by periods of low energy. You may use this information to spot over-training when it’s lurking around the corner. Best of all however, training diaries keep you motivated and stop you getting stuck in a rut.
They help you to avoid repeating the same intensities and overloads over and over again, so you can continuously strive to update and improve you training, and along with it, your results.
matthew.muscat.inglott@mcast.edu.mt