Should I Count Calories? | Diet And Nutrition

Keeping an exercise log can help you stay on track with your fitness and diet goals.  Learn the six reasons why you need one.

Making progress toward your health, diet and fitness goals isn’t easy … especially if you aren’t keeping track of that progress. One of the seven healthy habits of highly-fit people is that they keep a log of their exercise (and often, diet) in order to keep themselves accountable.

But are exercise logs really necessary? Can’t you just keep track of your workouts in your head?

Check out these six reasons for keeping an exercise log or journal and decide for yourself:

Reason #1: Exercise Logs Let You Measure Progression

One of the basic principles of weight training is progression.

During each additional workout you need to challenge yourself to overload the muscle a little more than the last workout.  Depending on your goals, this progressive overload will continuously strengthen the muscle, increase endurance, size or a combination of the three.

However, if you don’t know how much weight you used, the number of repetitions or how many sets of a given exercise you performed, it becomes very difficult to consistently overload the muscle and make progress.

By keeping detailed notes of your exercises, the order in which they were performed in, the weight used, repetitions, sets and rest periods, you’ll always know exactly what you did in your previous workout. This will help you make sure that your next workout is slightly different and slightly more challenging than the last.

ShareThis

Tags: Exercise, exercise diary, exercise journal, exercise log, fitness diary, fitness journal, fitness log, training journal, training log

Related posts

Tag: sparkpeople