There’s not many things more fulfilling than getting in good shape. Whether that means you are sending yourself to the Olympics, or breaking an hour for a 10k run for the first time, the feeling is the same. Simply awesome.
And no matter how grand or modest our ambitions in the gym there is one tool that can universally help in getting us there.
Here are just a few of the awesome things that start to happen when you track your workouts in a training journal.
1. You get more consistent with your workouts.
Inconsistency is the chief struggle we all have with our fitness and nutrition. We always start out with a blast of inspired fury, ready to take on our workout goals with scorching, white-hot motivation.
But then what happens?
We lose interest. We aren’t as motivated. We get distracted, injured, sick—and miss a workout.
That one missed workout turns into a couple workouts, until we are sitting two cheeks sunken in the couch with a bag of Doritos in one hand and Netflix shaming us with a—“Do you want to continue watching?” on the screen.
Writing out your workout routine won’t eliminate all the setbacks that happen along the way—but it’s use will motivate you to stay on track longer and to get back into your gym routine faster.
2. You see big picture with your goals.
One of the most common problems we all experience are maladjusted expectations.
Maybe it’s because we have been force-fed a steady diet of misconceptions about how easy it can be to get in shape. Or we see how fast people drop weight on infomercials and think that if they could do it, so could we. Or that we need to always be super motivated to workout.
So we white-knuckle things for a few weeks, doing everything as well as we can. But then when the results don’t start to arrive as fast as we’d like we get frustrated. Demoralized.
And feel a wee bit helpless that maybe we don’t have such a firm grip on our workouts goals after all.
Writing out your workouts will give you a better sense of how long progress actually takes. It will show you that maybe you weren’t working as hard as you initially thought, and can encourage you to take corrective action moving forward.
Having the goal is important, but having a goal where you know with some measure of realistic accuracy how long will take to achieve it is a game-changer.
3. The lifestyle stuff gets the attention it needs.
Let’s be honest, very few of us are getting the amount of sleep we need each night and fueling ourselves properly. And to be fair, getting a full night of rest and not eating like a dumpster is challenging between work stress, personal relationships, convenience of crap foods, and binge watching TV shows. Even those who really should know better, elite collegiate athletes, struggle with proper nutrition.
While you might have an intuitive understanding of how spotty your sleep and nutrition habits currently are, once you start measuring them in your workout journal you will be stunned/disappointed/motivated by how much you could be doing things better.
Keeping a food journal has been shown to significantly increase the likelihood of adherence to diet plans, with one study done by Kaiser Permanante found that those who self-monitored their nutritional intake lost double the weight versus those that didn’t.
The big thing about tracking and monitoring your workouts and lifestyle is that it shines some self-awareness on these things.
What gets measured, gets managed.
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