Training Logs, Are They Important?

With summer here many of us, including myself are trying to get that perfect Beach and Swim wear ready Body. In the attempt to achieve that perfect body we often make many changes – both in exercise and nutritional habits. Question is, do you know which one of those changes is working – or even better which one is not working?

How can you tell which changes are beneficial? How do you evaluate your progress? I know that you are logging both diet and exercise everyday! ? Logs are our best way to analyze our progress or lack of.

Seems that I am always training for some sort of competition. So I log everything – sleep patterns, eating habits, exercise routines and how I feel during the workout and during the day. This is very important in deciphering if my current routines are effective or not!

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If you are working toward a goal and your progress is not what you want or think it should be, then it is time to look at your current routine – both diet and exercise.

When I analyze my logs looking as for the culprit why I am not making the progress I expect. I look at my current habits in this order:

Diet – both number of calories and the breakdown of calories

Workout intensity – how difficult the workouts are

Length of workout – amount of time in the gym

Recovery times – amount of time between workouts

Amount of Sleep and Quality—sleep is very important to both workout recovery and weight loss.

If my goal is to improve my body composition, then you must know what you are currently doing in order to be able to make a change. You can not change something that you know nothing about, right?

The key here is to only change one thing at a time also. If you make to many changes to your current routines, then how will you know what change was the one that had a positive effect?

It is also necessary to allow enough time for your change to be effective. A minimum of two weeks is needed for the adjustment to begin to show signs of working. The signs might be as subtle as more energy in the morning when you wake to one more easy rep on the bench press.

If no positive signs are noted then it is necessary to re-evaluate and make further or different changes.

The same steps can and should be taken for you workout. Once again it is important to only change one aspect of your workout at a time – be it intensity, time or types exercises used.

When working toward goals, it is important to continually evaluate our progress. This is only possible if we keep records of where we were when we started and how we are working toward them.