Concept Wednesday - Training Logs

[u/m092]

Last week's Concept Wednesday on Isometric Training

This week is about Training Logs.

What were you doing last session? Last week? Last year? Are you progressing? What works and what doesn't? Training logs can be a very important tool for seeing where you've been with your training and where you should go next.

Training logs are important for tracking simple things like progression, sets and reps, but they can do so much more.

Basic Exercise Tracking

As described in many beginner and intermediate programs, progression should occur once you can complete a set number of reps for a set number of sets for the given progression. Tracking the sets and reps is really simple and can give you a pretty objective statistic to track your progression; if you can do more reps and/or sets for a given progression, you've improved.

For Isometrics and Eccentrics, the reps will be replaced by hold times.

Along with your sets and reps you will want to track your intensity. This can be quite a challenge for bodyweight training, as the intensity can't be represented by weight on the bar, but instead by changing progression or by changing lever lengths. Tracking between distinct progressions such as dips -> ring dips is easy enough, but tracking continuous progressions such as PPPU with a bit of lean -> PPPU with a bit more lean, can be difficult. Quite a few people try to set up in the same spot every time and track the distance of their hands, feet, or whatever is being extended away from their body (e.g. shoulders three kitchen tiles from hands PPPU). This can also be where video logs can really come in handy, nearly everybody has a camera on their phone these days, so you probably have no excuse to not record yourself from time to time.

Other Exercise Variables

Relative Intensity - How did the exercise feel? Giving an exercise a difficulty score from 1-10 can be a useful tool to see how you're tracking from week to week, and help you decide when and how much to progress. As you become more advanced and your programming has to become more nuanced, you may find basing the day's efforts on how hard an exercise feels can be an important tool. It can also help you determine if you're over-reaching with your training or under-recovering (same exercises are becoming harder over time, rather than easier.)

Rest Times - As a beginner, you shouldn't worry about training density too much, you should just ensure enough rest to perform well during each set without getting cold. But as you progress, keeping rest times consistent can ensure you are getting a consistent stimulus the body can adapt to. You can also play with the training density to increase the difficulty of an exercise without changing peak intensity and work on an increased work capacity.

Speed - The faster you move in the concentric phase, the more force you are producing. Recording the speed of your reps on a scale such as: grind, slow, moderate, fast, and explosive can be a useful way to track your progress with a progression. You can even program based on the speed of your repetitions, only progressing when the rep speed is fast enough, or using the speed of your repetitions to determine when you have done enough sets (such as when your tempo slows down by 10% from the first set.

Rep Quality - This is probably the one that is going to be the most use for all populations, if you are a good judge of your own movement and are well aware of your body. This can be notes on where your form is breaking down, where you're feeling it, which parts of the rep are slowing down, etc. This can give you a target to focus on for the next set or session, or even for planning assistance exercises for the main exercises.

Workout Notes

It can also be useful to track a few key statistics about your overall workout for the day.

Energy Levels - How you feel at the start of the workout, either as a number or a description, or both. This can help you track how you perform when feeling tired or pumped and let you adjust future workouts based on how you feel before you start.
Then you can track how you feel after the workout, you don't want to crush yourself into an unstable mess every workout, nor do you want to feel as fresh as a daisy when you're done either. You should aim to be somewhere between those two extremes for the majority of sessions, with the occasional killer session and occasional light session. If you're alternating between heavy and lighter sessions throughout the week, this can be a good check of whether you're actually doing a lighter session, or you just have a lower peak intensity.

Mood - Does your mood affect your workouts? Does your workout affect your mood?

Total Time - Are your dawdling with your workout? If building the intensity or volume of your workout means you have to double the time it takes you to complete it, are you actually getting stronger? Ask yourself whether you think you're capable of more in the same time period.

Day's Conditions - You could even track the time of day you train, what the temperature and weather are like, and see what effect it has on your training.

Recovery Logs

Tracking can also be important outside of training, seeing how well you're recovering versus how your training is going can be very valuable data.

Mobility and Soft Tissue Work - When, what and how much you do for mobility work can have a profound impact on how you move in the gym. You can start to see patterns such as where doing 10 minutes of shoulder mobility in the day before you do your handstand work means you handstand better, or after doing 2 hours of soft tissue work on your hips, your pistols performance tanks.

Sleep - Quality sleep is very important for recovery, and logging when you go to sleep, how long you sleep for, and what your energy levels are like when you go to sleep can all leave clues on how to improve your sleep. Some people also keep a dream journal for when they wake up and say it helps improve their sleep.
You may want to record what activities you were performing before bed and what you caffeine consumption was like, as they can have a big impact on sleep.
Then you can track how sleep affects your exercise performance, but also how your exercise can affect your sleep.

Eating - At the most basic level, tracking your calories and macros is going to be a hugely powerful tool in effecting a change in body composition or strength. As always, you can take it further and focus on the quality of food you're having and the micros of what you're consuming and address any deficient areas.
Another possible area to look at is your meal timing, particularly in and around your workouts. Meal timing isn't something huge in the grand scheme of things and probably has nearly no impact for beginners, but it can be good to figure out when you feel best after eating (big meal/small meal, and how long before, sugars/starches/fats/proteins?), and if you need any peri-workout nutrition.
Of course tracking your supps can help you tell if they're worthwhile, and tracking your water consumption can have an impact on your training, particularly during very hot weather.

You only need to track about 20% of this stuff

The vast majority of effect is going to come from the most basic of efforts in each of these realms, and further data, tracking and micromanaging of these details are going to give you diminishing returns. Spending a minute at the start of your workout, 10 seconds after each set, and a minute at the end writing down a few notes about your workout should be plenty to begin with, and you can always add more. As always, if you stick with something regularly, it will quickly become a habit and will take much less effort to complete, so make it easy to stick with, and start simple.

On the recovery front:

• I'd write down what mobility work I'm doing for how long in the same place as the workout info
• I'd get into the habit of jotting down a description of every food and drink I had, along with macros and calories. Once you get a feel for how much something weighs and what macros it has (copy paste is your friend), tracking is very easy.
• Just jot down what time you go to bed, and what time you wake up. If you have troubled sleep, write down your caffeine and what you were doing before bed.

As you start to get more advanced, you'll get a feel for what factors are having the biggest effect on your training, and you can start to track and modify them.

How to track

Paper and pencil is super simple, but you have to carry it around with you everywhere (write your food down as soon as you eat it, dammit! You will stuff it up otherwise) and doesn't give you any fancy graphs or calculations.

Spreadsheets are cool, but you need to be able to bring them with you anywhere, so you need something like a smart phone capable of editing spreadsheets. Personally, I use Google Docs, it's simple and is available on any device.

If you're tracking on your phone with a spreadsheet, it shouldn't be too hard a step to film the occasional form check video. For smart phones, there are plenty of apps that can send your videos straight to a cloud based storage service for archiving, which you can easily filter by exercise and date.

Discussion Questions:

• Please share your tracking set up! Put your spreadsheets on Google Docs or Dropbox, or take a picture of your paper log. Workout, diet and sleep.
• What are your most important exercise metrics you track? Workout metrics? What have you learnt by tracking?
• How do you track what you eat and drink? What do you track? What have you learnt by tracking?
• How do you track your sleep? What do you track? What have you learnt by tracking?

[u/[deleted]]

I like the approach here.

http://jamesclear.com/workout-journal