Use a Workout Journal to Reach Your Fitness Goals

Keeping (and using), a workout journal is one of the best ways to achieve your fitness goals. Whether you have a specific goal in mind or not, tracking your progress in a workout journal will help you continue to progress and improve.

Lots of people have goals. Most even have some great ones. When it comes to achieving those goals, it’s more than the thought that counts. You have to take action. A workout journal will help you understand the path to success and will help you stay on target.

>> If You Want to Achieve Your Goals, Set SMART Ones

Make your workout journal work for you. Keep a notebook or use a fitness app – choose the method that you are most likely to stick with.

The 6 Details to Track in Your Workout Journal

Your Goals

First step in achieving your goals: remember that you have them. You face obstacles every day: choosing the gym over the couch when you’re tired, eating a side salad instead of French fries with lunch. It’s easier to make healthy decisions if you constantly remind yourself of your goals so that they can live at the front of your head.

Every Monday, write your weekly goals in your workout log. These weekly goals should always connect to your long-term goals. They should also be specific enough that you can take action on a daily basis.

For example, if you want to run a marathon, you start by training for the 5k. Your weekly goal might be to run a total of 10 miles. You can break that weekly goal down into daily, actionable steps in any way you choose but knowing that you are following a plan that will help you achieve your goal is key to keeping you motivated.

Your Warm Up, Cool Down and Stretching

Your warm up, cool down and stretches are the least glamorous parts of your workout, but they are still important and tracking them will help you remember to do them. Plus, you might find that you learn a lot about what stretching does for your workout. You might see a trend that stretching prior to leg day helps your lift more, or that completing a full cool down and post-workout stretch helps your recover faster.

>> How Stretching Makes You Stronger

Specific Exercises

Keeping track of the specific exercises that you perform will help you a) learn the exercise names and b) ensure that you are hitting a variety of muscles in a variety of ways every week.

Why is variety important? Because your body responds to stress and variety introduces stress. When your body becomes efficient at a movement, for example walking, it doesn’t expend any extra energy to do it and it doesn’t grow in any way in order to become more efficient. If you throw barbell squats, barbell dead lifts, leg press and cable kickbacks into a workout, you challenge your body to adapt (aka progress and get stronger/leaner/healthier).

Sets, Reps, Weight and Rest Time

Sets: the group of consecutive repetitions that your perform without resting.

Reps (aka repetitions): the single execution of an exercise.

Weight: the amount of force you are lifting, pushing, pulling, etc.

Rest Time: the amount of time you take to recover in between reps and sets.

Suppose you do 3 sets of 8-10 reps with 10-pound dumbbells and roughly 60 seconds of rest in between pretty much all the time, and you are frustrated because you’re going to the gym but you’re not seeing results. Your body gets used to the movements you ask it to do repeatedly. To see results, you must change things up and if you know what you’ve been doing, you can decide where to make a change.

To grow, you could add a set. You could change your rep range to 3-6 or 12-15. Or you could pick up heavier weights or decrease your rest time. All of these changes to your routine will challenge your body, force it to adapt and help you see results.

Cardio

Whether or not improving cardiovascular fitness is your goal, it’s a good idea to do some cardio. The same rules apply to cardio as they do to lifting weights: you have to challenge yourself to see results, physically and physiologically.

For example, if you are a runner and you want to get faster or run longer distances, running 3 miles every other day at a 10-minute mile pace won’t cut it. Track your time, your pace, and your distance so that you can add challenges. You can add speed work one day a week. Add hills another day. Fitting in sprint intervals can do wonders for body composition and pace goals.

How You Feel

Finally, track how you feel. I don’t mean keep a diary, but make a few quick notes about how you’re feeling before and during your workout. Some days you are going to feel great (maybe you slept well and had a great pre-workout meal). Other days you might feel inexplicably tired and unmotivated. When you look back, it’s important to understand how those strangely mediocre workouts connect with your feeling tired or sick. It’s also important to connect the stellar workouts with feeling positive and well-rested.

>> Build Your Own Workout Like a Personal Trainer

Using Your Workout Journal to Reach Your Goals

Being able to recognize your progress on paper is motivating. The information that you collect in your workout journal is positive reinforcement on a daily basis. Ask yourself the following questions to analyze your journal and use the answers to keep progressing to reach your fitness goals.

 Am I Lifting Enough Weight?

If you pick up the 10-pound weights workout after workout, week after week, month after month, you might not notice, or think to notice, that 10-pounds doesn’t feel heavy anymore. When you track how much weight you lift and how you feel, you’ll notice those things.

Use my technique: I track how many reps and how much weight I lift for each set of each exercise. After I finish the exercise, I circle the weight that I think I should start at next time. I also make a note at the bottom about how I felt finishing at the heaviest weight I finished at.

*Note: At the beginning of every workout, I always think that I am not as strong as my workout journal says I am. That’s why flipping back to see what weight I circled last time is HUGE for my progress. If I didn’t circle that I should start dead lifting at 135 pounds, I’d always start at 95 pounds and work up from there, maybe reaching 135 pounds by my last lift. I won’t progress as fast as if I started at 135 pounds and worked up from there.

Am I Getting Enough Variety in My Strength Training?

Flip through your workout journal to make sure that you are mixing up your weight training enough, hitting every muscle group and using a variety of exercises to work out each muscle group. You might notice that you do upper body 3 times a week, but you only do lower body 1 time each week. Or you might notice “leg press” often, but not a whole lot of leg exercise variety beyond that. You should use your workout journal to make sure that you’re balancing your exercises for each muscle group.

Do you find yourself only doing dumbbell curls to work your biceps? Try throwing in some hammer curls, EZ bar curls, and cable curls. If you are always squatting or doing leg extensions, you aren’t balancing your leg muscles, so throw in some dead lifts and hamstring curls. Variety is the spice of life, and fitness.

Am I Getting Enough Cardio?

If your goal is to do more cardio, this question and its corresponding answer is obvious. But even if your goal is not necessarily to increase cardio, but to get stronger or more powerful or more mobile, cardio is an important piece of the health puzzle. Doctors recommend 150 minutes of moderate exercise each week to improve cardiovascular health.

A more detailed question to ask: is my cardio routine affecting my strength training routine, or vice versa? Do you spend 30 minutes on the rowing machine before strength training only to find yourself drained of energy and unable to complete your workout? If so, try switching cardio to the end of your workout or to another day entirely.

Am I Supporting My Workouts with Recovery Tools?

Are you warming up before your workout? Are you stretching and foam rolling after your workout? These are unglamorous, but highly important parts of your fitness routine and achieving your goals.

>> 11 Mobility Exercises To Improve Strength Training (Women’s Health Magazine)

Increased flexibility and mobility play a big role in continuing to get stronger and achieving your fitness goals. Think about one exercise in particular: the squat. You can certainly begin to squat with limited mobility. You’ll even achieve some strength increases and progress as a beginner. But you’ll max out the amount of weight that you can properly lift, using the right muscles and correct movement, if you don’t increase your mobility. The lower that you can get into your squat, the more you get out of it.

A simpler reason to check your recovery tools: to make sure you have them.

Am I Getting Enough Rest?

Your workout journal will show you patterns. One of those patterns might reveal stretches of time that you aren’t getting any recovery or rest time. It might feel counter-intuitive, but rest days are imperative to achieving your fitness goals, no matter what they are.

Fact: your workout does not build muscle. Your workout breaks muscle down. Your body only builds while at rest. If you workout every day, you give your body no time to rebuild and you end up being more susceptible to injury, depleting your immune system and burning out.

If your workout journal reveals infrequent rest days mixed in with your workout days, start scheduling your rest days ahead of time. Take a day off every couple of days to actively recover.

Not sure how to get started?

Grab my Workout Journal Template from the Free Resources Page.