When it comes to being a high performance athlete you go out of your way to do everything right. You plan and prepare your meals, designing them for peak recovery and fuel. You invest in the latest and greatest in gear, dropping ungodly amounts of money on tech suits, sneakers, compression gear and more.
And, of course, there is the investment of time. The countless, endless number of hours, days, weekends, and years that you devote to being a better athlete.
And yet, for all that energy and investment, most athletes don’t perform the simple act of keeping a workout journal. At some level, it’s understandable, with all the time spent training and competing the last thing we want to do is devote more to our sport.
But there are some seriously powerful reasons that you should start keeping a workout journal. From motivation, to being more consistent, to becoming a more self-aware athlete, there are some mega potent reasons to use one.
Here are just a few ways that a workout log book will help you be a better athlete.
It’s helpful for breaking down competitions. For athletes, self-awareness after competition is wildly important. To be able to properly assess and break down how you did when competing will much better inform and direct your training moving forward. What were the external factors that helped or hindered your performance? How was your mindset moving into the meet? How was your mindset during the competition? Gaining a better understanding of how you react under pressure, and how you perform best, will make you a much better athlete moving forward.
Shows you the weaknesses in your training. There are those one or two areas in your training that you avoid at all costs. If you are like me, you know what they are, you know that you have to be working on them, but fall victim to the “I’ll start on it tomorrow” line of reasoning that befalls us all when it comes to doing things we don’t like doing. The workout log book, with its accurate history of training, forces you to come to terms of having to face up to those weak spots in your training. Use your workout journal to plot out days where you specifically target the things you know you need to be working on.
Helps you put bad workouts into perspective. One of the funny things that happens when training, and writing about it, is that you get a better grasp of the peaks and valleys of your craft. There will be days where you know that things won’t go as well as they should—it’s the last day of the week of a brutal training cycle, or you slept like crap last night, or you simply weren’t feeling it. Writing out that stinky workout isn’t the best, but seeing it in the broader context of a series of really good workouts will help deaden its impact.
Use it for a better workout tomorrow. One of the sneakiest things athletes can do with a workout log is to plan out their workouts. Our brains have an awful tendency to pump the brakes on our effort and commitment the closer we get to our workouts. It’s instinct, and our brain’s way of hedging effort, under the understandable but mistaken belief that it needs to protect us from stress. One way to help get around this natural reaction is to plan your workouts ahead of time. (Pro Tip: Write out tomorrow’s workout tonight. You’ll always be more ambitious with your workouts when you write it out with a day’s notice.)
Making the most of your workouts and competitions is priority one as an athlete. Whether it is making sure that you are getting enough sleep each evening, or sticking to your nutrition plan, being a full time athlete is your job.
Keeping a workout journal is a low-impact, low-effort way to make the most of your training so that when you show up on the big day you will be able to leave it all out on the field without any regrets.
ABOUT THE WRITER
Olivier Poirier-Leroy is a former national level swimmer and consultant for USA Swimming. He writes over at his blog, YourWorkoutBook.com, about the latest in habit formation and workout motivation.