Can you tell me your squat pr? Of course you can. You could probably tell me your 1RM on
almost any lift you do regularly. But what was it 6 months ago? What weight have you been working during your volume sets? what have you been doing for assistance work? Has it changed? Is your program working?

These are the questions that can be answered if you keep a quality workout log. Records of past work will allow you to assess the impact of whatever you keep note of. Important things to keep track of in addition to lifts are general nutrition notes, weight, extremes of water intake, particularly stressful life events, extremes of sleep, sickness. Noting these factors occasionally in your log will help you to get a picture of how you are recovering.

Let’s say you are a weightlifter and you are thinking of switching to a Bulgarian style program. You can use you logs to look for periods of time when you training was similar. If you notice that your sleep is always worse during these times and that you are always getting minor colds you can use this information to plan out when you will do the intense cycle of training. It is probably best not to pair an intense training cycle with a time of the year where you are likely to be exposed to other sources of stress.

Information about sickness or severe allergies related to a particular season can be used to plan training cycles so that the cumulative stress does not cause over-reaching or over-training. The only way to have a record of these effects is to keep a workout log with information on how you are training and how you are responding to that training.

There are many different way to record your workouts. The most conventional way is a small notebook, just like the ones you had in middle school, or a ledger book. Any collection of lined paper capable of fitting in a workout bag should do the trick. You should be able to buy a suitable log book at any drug/office supply store. $1-$5 is a good price. How can you say no to that?

Recording the actual workout is the most difficult part. Not because of the complexity in writing down simple numbers, but because you need to get into the habit. It’s hard to record workouts if you have not been doing so before. Luckily if you can manage a week or two of solid recording you should have the pattern set with very little effort.

On to recording the workout. Any variation of recording sets/reps should do the trick. Just remember that anything written in a logbook is for the purposes of looking back on training and making decisions about future training (more on this in a later post). Therefore it must be legible and tell you what you have actually done. If you are learning how to warm up then it’s probably important to record this. Otherwise you should just record your working sets. How many sets/reps did you do at a certain weight? and for what exercises? That’s the good stuff.
Other things might include how you are feeling (emotionally and physically), what the technique problems were, anything relevant to performance on that particular workout. These comments should be minimal, that poem you scribbled in the side of your log was no good anyway.

There are many ways to keep a log. Find the one that works for you. Stay tuned for ways to digitize your log and other log related musings.