Why it’s Important:
In General:
Keeping track of your training helps to ensure you are consistently training and inducing the desired stress repeatedly over time. It also helps you to know what weight, sets, and reps to use especially when you are working towards specific goals. Most of us are probably not as good at keeping a mental log of our training routine as we think we are. You might think you know what weight you did last time or what days you trained but there’s a good chance you are too “zoomed in” to your current day and not “zoomed out” enough to remember the big picture of the training week and plan as a whole. Keeping a log can help keep you on track for where you need to go in your training journey.
For those newer to training:
When you are learning and new to following a specific plan with training, it is very helpful to log your plan and what you actually did. That way you learn how to be consistent and pay attention to what’s going on with your training and how you respond. You need direction and something that tells you exactly what to do so you have a plan to follow to guide you to where you need to go.
For pain issues:
You have data you can look back on that may give you insight as to why something started to hurt. You may see something that you did not realize at the time such as a large increase in volume and/or intensity over a short period of time which could have led to the issue. This can give further understanding into why it may have happened and can help inform your training adjustments from there to address the issue.
For Strength:
Progressive overload is key to getting stronger and keeping track of where you are at is very helpful here. Knowing what weight you did last session and the RPE to indicate progressing or staying the same for the next session is very important, thus having a record of this is paramount. If you are working towards a certain goal such as a powerlifting meet, it is very helpful to make sure your progress is tracking towards what you want to be able to do.
When working with a coach:
The plan is crucial, and your coach also needs to know how you are executing the plan. This is how you both communicate and how your coach helps you along your journey towards your goals.
Keeping you accountable and consistent:
Can be a way of making you feel accountable as there is a planned day with training that you know you need to do. Also keeps you on a consistent schedule so you don’t absentmindedly skip 3, 4, 5+ days. Sometimes you think you have your schedule and what you’ve done accurate in your head but that may not be as accurate as you think. If it's logged, then you can see when you’ve trained and when you need to train again.
Keeping your emotions in check:
We are all susceptible to our emotions especially when it comes to training. We may get bored with the plan easily or want to change things too soon or often because we think we need a better plan to get to our desired outcomes. The best plan is one that is stuck to consistently for a long period of time-it’s more the consistency over time that makes the plan work vs some specific, magical routine. There are also a lot of times where you won’t feel like training or doing the planned training. Having your training log can help keep you on track and avoid being led astray by your emotions of that day. It’s not that adjusting your training because you want to or feel like you should is all bad, but changing things too often or too soon may rob you of the progress you could make with consistently doing the same routine for longer periods of time.
Why it may not be necessary:
For Hypertrophy:
As long as you are consistently hitting the muscle groups you want to work at least 2x/week for at least 2 sets a session and the sets are taken close to failure, the exact plan probably doesn’t matter especially if you are solely focused on hypertrophy and nothing else. The exact lift, weight, and rep range can vary each time as long as you hit the muscle groups desired and sets are taken close or all the way to failure a couple times a week or more, you’re covered. So, if you can internalize your training so that you know you are hitting these things consistently every week, then logging is not necessary here.
For Strength:
As long as you are working in the ideal rep ranges and intensities for strength consistently and can autoregulate your training to match that desired stress every day, then you will likely be just fine and make good progress training without worrying about what the exact weight is session to session. If you autoregulate effectively, then you will get stronger and add weight to the bar over time naturally anyway because autoregulation will allow this to happen. You just need to be specific in your training (the exact lift, volumes and intensities) consistently every session or week.
When you are experienced, understand and know what your training needs to consist of and are able to effectively autoregulate your training:
If you have internalized your training plan in your head and you know how to make sure the stress from training meets the intended stress to accumulate towards your goals, then you may not need to log your training, or at least maybe not all the specifics of your training. If you are able to adjust weight to match the intended stress, then it may not be a big deal to know exactly what weight you did last session and what weight you need today as you will be able to find this through autoregulating. Understanding that training is all about imposing the specific, intended stress consistently and being able to do this does not necessarily require pre-planned weights. If you are just training and developing and don’t have a specific goal or performance in the short term, then you really may not have to worry too much about logging your training if that’s not your thing.
If it’s an annoyance, makes you too neurotic about your training, or makes you adjust training unnecessarily:
If you just dread the extra demand of logging and/or it makes you obsess to the point of taking the joy out of training, then don’t worry about it. Just train in the way you intend to and make sure it’s consistent and imposes the stress you need for the adaptations you desire. Also, tracking things like your readiness to train, sleep time and quality, and other variables such as heart rate variability, etc can be interesting to reflect on, but I don’t believe you need to use that data to inform training that day. How you feel does not always reflect how you need and are able to train that day. I really don’t agree with making any training adjustments based on those metrics because your training can go completely different from what those metrics would indicate. If your data suggests pulling back but you could’ve done just fine doing the planned training or even pushing harder, then you’ve unnecessarily robbed yourself of a training stimulus you should have gotten based on metrics you’re tracking that don’t reliably indicate performance. On the other hand, if your data suggests pushing training but you find out once you start training that this is not appropriate and you are not up to this, then you could risk making poor training decisions and potentially negatively impacting your progress or getting hurt based on the misleading data. It can be helpful to look back on how a period of training went or if an issue has arisen and see trends of things like session RPE, sleep, training readiness, etc to see if there is any insight, but this is for reflective analysis, not to be used as prescriptive data.
Bottom Line:
Over the years I have become less neurotic about logging training. I used to think every aspect of any data from training needed to be logged and analyzed. However, I’ve learned over time that it can lead to being way too neurotic about it and that past training results often are not repeatable since our lives and training responses are so dynamic, multifactorial, and constantly changing. I’ve learned it’s more about making sure your plan aligns with what you want to train towards and consistently doing this over and over again. You only need to log what helps ensure you are consistently going in the right direction. When you know what sets, reps, frequency, lifts, etc need to be for strength and/or hypertrophy, then you just need to make sure you are doing those things in a way that imposes the specific stress you need over and over again. The exact weight on the bar you logged last time, today, or next time doesn’t mean that much unless it matches what you need for the desired stress that session. I still do believe some sort of a training log is important, but I don’t think you need to log every little detail, constantly analyze and use that data to inform your next training session or block, etc. like I used to. Ultimately I would recommend some way of keeping track of your training that is tailored to how specific or non-specific you want to make it-do what works for you and your situation.