Whether your goal is to gain muscle mass, lose weight or maintain your health and wellness, busy schedules and hectic days can make it hard to stay motivated and keep track of your fitness progress.
The solution may be as simple as tracking your workouts. Keeping a workout log can help keep you on track toward your goals and maximize the time spent at the gym. Below are 11 ways that tracking your workout can improve your training and help you get the results you’re after.
1. Provides focus and direction
Your workout log can help you plan and strategize your workouts. Knowing the purpose of your workout, be it strength, endurance, speed, or flexibility, will keep you focused on a specific goal each day.
2. Helps you use your workout time more efficiently
When you have focus and direction, you can use your time in the gym more efficiently.
3. Keeps you accountable
By logging how often, how long, and how hard you work, the proof of your commitment is on the page. If you start slipping into a negative pattern, seeing it right there in front of you can get you back on track.
4. Helps you decide when and how to modify your workout
If you’re not seeing the progress you want, your log can help you decide what needs to be changed. Maybe you’re not doing enough sets, focusing too much on one thing or not enough on another, or maybe you’ve been overdoing it and need more recovery time. Your log provides the data you need to make the right modifications.
5. Helps you stay motivated or get inspired
A workout log keeps a record of your successes – the time you beat your record mile time or your month-long workout streak. If you feel yourself losing motivation, looking back at how hard you’ve worked and the progress you’ve made can remind you why you’re doing what you’re doing and give you back your drive.
6. Reinforces your commitment to your goals
Tracking your workouts reminds you that you’re working toward something and keeps track of everything you do to reach that goal.
7. Helps you track and measure your progress
Whatever physical activity you’re doing, tracking your workouts allows you to log your speed, strength, or endurance, providing you with a clear measurement of your progress.
8. Reveals useful patterns
By keeping track of your workouts as well as other aspects of your health like sleep and diet, you can find revealing patterns to help you maximize your overall fitness.
9. Can be a place to journal about your fitness journey
Your workout log doesn’t have to be all raw data. You can use it to write about your fitness journey, vent on your off days, write about how you felt that day, or provide yourself some motivational self-talk.
10. Provides you with data about your health
Every bit of data you collect gives you a more complete picture of your health. You can track your health data, like your heart rate, in addition to your workout data like your running distance or weight lifting routine.
11. Helps you to set smarter goals
While setting ambitious goals can help you reach your greatest potential, unrealistic goals can leave you more discouraged than inspired. Your workout log can give you an idea of how fast you can actually progress and help you to set achievable goals.
Whatever your workout style or method, tracking your fitness journey can keep you accountable and focused on your goal while also giving you useful data to help you reach your maximum potential.
By simply adding a workout log to your routine, you can know yourself and your health better, make more informed changes to your routine, and see yourself progress toward your goals. Whether you use a fitness tracking app or just a plain old notebook, you can start logging your workouts and making those gains!
