A fitness journal is a chronicle of your fitness journey. It helps you track and analyze your progress, set goals, and stay motivated. What does a fitness journal look like? It can be a notebook, a spreadsheet, an app, a calendar, a diary, or a journal. What’s important is that you choose a format that works best for you.
Depending on your goals, you may track your workouts, nutrition, energy level, or how you feel physically and emotionally. Most importantly, you only need to track what helps you achieve your fitness goals, but how do you know what to track?
What Should You Track In Your Fitness Journal?
Figuring out what you should track is challenging because different activities may produce different metrics. Also, you may change your goals, which could affect what you’re tracking. Thankfully, your journal is flexible. That said, let’s look at some ideas for you to consider for your fitness journal.
For Any Fitness Goals
- How You Feel – Was it a challenging workout? Are you experiencing burnout? Does something hurt? How is your mood? Keeping track of how you’re feeling physically and mentally can raise red flags that you could be overdoing it and may need a day off to recharge your mind and body.
- Interesting Observations – What may seem like random thoughts may be insightful self-assessment. Include your thoughts and feelings in your fitness journal. They may not seem helpful now, but they could be later when you look back.
- Sleep – How long you sleep and the quality of your sleep can be an early indicator of overtraining. As a result, you may need to include more rest days or adjust your workouts.
- Water Intake – Exercising makes you sweat. Therefore, tracking how much water you drink can help you stay hydrated.
Aerobic Fitness
- Total Time – If you track only one thing, then keep track of how long you exercise. As you become more fit, you should be able to maintain your efforts longer.
- Total Distance – Although this applies only to activities like cycling, hiking, running, and walking, tracking your distance indicates whether you’re becoming more fit. Tracking time and distance can also show if you’re getting faster for distance activities like cycling, running, and walking.
- Pace – If one of your fitness goals is to become faster, track your pace. Pace is determined by dividing distance by time to get the average pace per mile (or kilometer).
- Activity – Record the activity’s name, time, distance, or pace if you do different activities. This is helpful when you have different goals related to specific activities.
Building Strength
- Sets and Reps – Whether you’re doing a bench press, push-up, plank, or squat, track which exercises and the number of reps, or in the case of planks, how long you hold those positions.
- Measurements – If your goal is to increase or decrease the size of body parts, then take measurements. Don’t measure every day. Instead, measure every couple of weeks or once a month.
Weight Management
- Weight – You should weigh yourself no more than once a day and at roughly the same time of day. However, you should not worry about normal daily fluctuations. Instead, look at your weight over several weeks to see if you’re heading in the right direction.
- Meals – If your goal is to eat better or manage your weight, then track your meals and which ones you enjoy. As a result, you can use your fitness journal to plan future meals that work towards or help maintain your goal weight.
- Calories – Although tracking your caloric intake daily can be helpful, obsessing about calories can be counterproductive. However, tracking your calories can help you reach your goals if you want to limit your caloric intake.
Updating Your Fitness Journal
Some fitness journals kept in a notebook, diary, calendar, or spreadsheet require a little more discipline to keep up to date. However, you can easily update it after a meal or workout. It only takes a few minutes to do.
On the other hand, thanks to technology, you can automatically track your workouts, sleep, and weight. If you use an app, a fitness tracker, and a smart scale, you can automatically add them to your fitness journal. Therefore, you will only need to manually add information that can’t be updated automatically, such as your meals, notes, and how you feel mentally and physically.
If you make it a habit to record your efforts and experiences, then you’re ready to harness the power of your fitness journal. The more consistent you are, the more helpful your fitness journal will be.
Harnessing The Power Of Your Fitness Journal
You’ve stuck with your routine and kept your fitness journal current. Now, you have all of this information about your efforts, feelings, and experiences. Within your journal are answers about how you got here and clues on where to go next. There are other uses as well. Here are some examples of how your fitness journal can help you.
Tracking Your Progress
Your fitness journal can show you how you’ve progressed over weeks, months, and years. You can go back in time to see where you were and compare it to more recent entries. One of the advantages of using an app is it can create charts and graphs so you can visualize your progress.
After comparing your past to today, you can judge whether your efforts are working. If not, you can make adjustments now and steer yourself in the right direction.
Motivation
When you make efforts to change, you are bound to have good and bad days. Sometimes, you get into a rut and need a pick-me-up. Your fitness journal can do just that. All you have to do is look through your entries and see the incremental progress you’ve been making. In fact, this is a good time to add another entry in which you talk about how you feel. Not only can it help you through this rough patch, but your future self could revisit this point in time for guidance.
Experiment
There is more than one way to accomplish your goals. Some ways are better than others. How are you going to know unless you experiment? If you’ve been keeping notes on how you feel physically and emotionally while trying different techniques, workouts, or diets, then you can use those results when planning new goals. Moreover, your past results may hold clues and possible shortcuts to help avoid past mistakes and plot a path to accomplish new goals faster.
The Takeaway
Your fitness journal tracks your progress, keeps you motivated, and helps you achieve your goals. By recording details from your efforts, you can review your fitness journal to visualize your progress and make important decisions. As a result, you’ll have all the information you need to keep yourself motivated and on track.
FitTrend’s mission is to help you along your self-improvement journey, promote an active lifestyle, and help you achieve your goals. Our journal can help you track your workouts, weight, mood, calories, and more. Also, FitTrend allows you to connect supported gadgets to your account to make it easier for you to update your journal automatically. Create your account today and start using FitTrend for free!
Disclaimer: No content on this site should ever be used as a substitute for direct medical advice from your doctor or other qualified clinician.
