Originally published April/May 1996
The number and extent of benefits possible from maintaining a record of training and performance are substantial and often not immediately recognized.
Its motivating to see how you’ve improved, comparing the sets, reps, and resistances now to those used initially. Maintaining training details increases the awareness of often overlooked subtle changes. The reward of such awareness provides evidence of progress, and encourages you to continue, thereby assuring ‘exercise adherence’. Factors such as your subjective feelings, how quickly you recover, new found levels of strength, recovery, endurance and energy become more evident when recorded “on paper”.
Journals clarify what and how results were achieved. They serve as a permanent record of what was done to achieve a particular result, including the little touches, changes in approaches and subtleties which are are often forgotten. As such they can be used to repeat or enhance results.
Training diaries are a useful tool in avoiding overuse injuries and overtraining, particularly when used in conjunction with an appropriate monitoring process. They can be used to help identify factors which may have contributed to injury. A training and performance history provides an invaluable reference of established capacities when resuming from injury or sickness.
Routinely logging and reviewing training and performance helps create a comprehensive, structured and written approach which maximises the effectiveness and efficiency of your program. When combined with regular physical evaluation, record keeping helps assess the appropriateness of the process used. This improves the chances of achieving your fitness objectives.
There are many ways of keeping records, each with its own benefits. Gym cards / Programs are used at most centres. They are simplistic, easy to use and portable. They usually record only basic information such as weight used, numbers of sets number of repetitions but do help you stay on track by following the program in sequence. Usually they are kept on file at the centre. Training Diaries are more comprehensive, including aspects such as exercise intensity, mental attitude and appetite, whilst monitoring other lifestyle aspects such as mood, diet, rest and sleep. They include provision for physical evaluations, goal setting and summaries. Computers provide the additional capacity to plan periodized workouts which may be edited and printed out as required either daily or weekly. Computer programs also allow manipulation of data which combined with powerful graphic capacities help the review and fine tuning of programming. They allow for recording of almost limitless training variables and are usually quite simple to use.
Whichever method you chose, the reward for the little extra effort to maintain an accurate log of your activity should be repaid many times over, through the efficient and effective realisation of your fitness objectives.
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Regards Kym
