The Importance of Keeping a Training Journal

To ensure that you keep making progress, it is important that you keep records of your diet and training. I have a file for each year of training which has the various routines I followed, foods I ate, exercises and poundage I used, competition strategy, amount of cardio, and much more. I record everything. You cannot rely on your memory for remembering what works for you.

Record keeping allows you to fine tune your training. For example in my first year of competing I realized I needed more lat width. I looked back to my records on training and realized I was not doing enough pull down movements. I was then able to adjust my back training program to include more pull down movements. If I had not recorded my workouts for the previous year I would not have know what aspects of my training needed to be improved.

It is also important to keep records of your day to day workouts. To gain strength (and muscle size) you must try to handle more weight or achieve more reps with the same weight each workout. If you do not know how much weight or how many reps you did the previous workout you will not know what to strive for the next time you hit that muscle group. My personal preference for recording data is a hard cover black book that will not get destroyed in the gym. With the advances in cell phone technology, many athletes use various fitness apps to track the same data.

Whatever your mode of record keeping, it is extremely important to be able to look back at the previous week’s workout and see how many reps you achieved at a given poundage. This will allow you to strive to either get more repetitions with the same weight or increase the weight. Weight should be increased only when you have increased in strength enough that you are no longer in the desired rep range. For example, if your goal is to do a working set of bench press for 6 reps and you achieved 9 reps, you will need to increase the weight next workout. Be sure weight increases are small enough that you are still able to get the desired number or reps. The size of the increase in poundage will also depend on the exercise you are increasing the weight for. Generally a 5% increase will be sufficient. This would translate into a 15 pound increase for Squats (if the athlete was using 300 pounds) or could be as little as 2 ½ pounds increase for concentration curl (if the athlete was using 50 pounds).