Why You Should Track Your Workouts
Why You Should Track Your Workouts
This whiteboard session will truly shine some light into being organized with your training, what do I mean by that? Tracking your workouts! When I first started training I had no idea what I was doing in regards to a routine, I had an “idea” of what I had done last time and just went workout from workout trying to remember what I had done from the previous workout in regards to the used weights, as well as the rep and set scheme.
There is a huge issue with this, many of us including myself can hardly remember what we ate last week, let alone remember all of these numbers. Today I alternate and try a bunch of different forms of using ways to track my progress overtime. These have included: log books, apps, google excel. Having these tools at hand will help ensure that you know exactly what you did the last time you step into the gym?
Why is this good? Well for one you can track you progress and be sure of it. Many times when I wasn’t tracking my workouts, the progress was very slow if not plateaued at a given time, more than likely I was doing the same weights over time and time again or even possibly less weight, reps or sets. When I built myself a routine that I tracked I started to see the most progress I have seen in months, both in strength and size. No longer was I playing the guessing game, I was organized and hitting my rep, weight and set goals every time I stepped into the gym. Sometimes I used to go based on how I felt and would coast, and not push my capabilities, this no longer happened.
Another great thing to include in your logged workouts would be a section for RPE, what is RPE? Rate of perceived exertion, essentially it is how hard you felt the exercise is. What is the reason you should be using this? Having an RPE section in your workout log sheet is to show you how an exercise may be getting easier over time and that it may be time to add more weight to that exercise, or if the RPE keeps getting higher and higher overtime, and you haven’t changed anything. This is possibly a sign that you are overtraining, and not recovering from workout to workout, maybe having to leave more time for recovery, or to lower the volume to a tolerable amount and reassess from there.
Today's goal for the whiteboard session was to show you the importance of tracking that workout, seeing your progress and being able to really push yourself!