A workout journal helps keep your goals on track

If you train regularly at a gym, or practice for a sport, you will find a workout journal an incredible device. All you need is a small, inexpensive notebook, a pen and maybe a pair of glasses.

Your workout journal will be used to record every gym workout and/or every sport training session that you do. After a few months, you may even regard it as priceless. The little notebook will contain aspects of a coach, a personal trainer, a teacher and a guidance counsellor.

As you record the date, the poundage of weights you lift, the number of reps and sets, etc., you create a source to refer to in the coming days, weeks and months. You may not see, or even be aware of, changes i n your body. But a workout journal will allow you to refer to the past to see how f ar you’ve come. For example, riffle through the pages to go back three months. How much were you lifting then? How much are you lifting now? Are you doing more sets, more reps? Are you working additional parts of your body than before?

The guidance counsellor part of your journal comes from the basic truth of any kind of exercise: the body adapts. Even if you’ve increased your ability to run the 300metre dash to an above average time of 60 seconds, the body will adapt to that effort and will no longer be so gruelling. If you’ve worked hard to double the amount of weight you can lift in a bench press, the body will adapt and the lift will no longer seem so hard to do.

So look in your journal to see how long you have been lifting the same amount of weight or doing the exact same exercise. Because of adapta- tion, the movements of training sessions should be changed frequently.

Before trying a new movement to work a muscle, lower the weight and add more resistance only gradually. If your training involves sprinting, don’t just use the same track over and over again; try sprinting in a parking lot or down a street without traffic.

The constant change-up will build more power and more fitness. Take an example from many pro athletes, who lower the amount of weight they’ve been lifting, then try lifting it much f aster. Record how much faster you can do your entire routine when you concentrate on speed. Do about five workouts where you go just for speed and record how much quicker you got through your personal program. Do these same five speed workouts about every two months, then check in your journal to see if your latest speed workouts are f aster than the ones you did six months ago.

Even those who work out just for body maintenance, and not to grow bigger or faster or stronger should keep a workout journal. If love handles start growing on your waist, it’s often because your body has started storing f at rather than burning it up. This often happens as you hit the next decade of your life. Refer to your journal to see if you need to increase your physical efforts.

Never throw away a journal, even if it fills the notebook. It may be of interest to you to look at a journal written years ago to see what you once did.

You’ll always be sure of what exercise routine helped you the most once you have recorded it in your workout journal.