10 reasons why you should track your workouts

You train with a plan and thus more effectively

Of course, you could also workout the way you feel like doing it on a given day and then track these freestyle workouts, but most likely if you track you will be training according to a training plan.

In almost every case, training according to a plan is more effective than training without a plan. You create (or have created) a training plan that is tailored to your needs, hopefully.

This plan will include training muscle groups that you like to train, and will also include training muscle groups that you don't like to train as much.

For example, many men like to work out their upper body but don't like to work out their legs at all, and many women like to work out their legs but don't like to work out their upper body. Nevertheless, most people, regardless of gender, don't actually want to totally neglect either the legs or the upper body.

This is taken into account when creating the training plan. For example, the plan for our hypothetical man would state that he should train his legs 2 days out of the 5 in the training week - on Mondays and Thursdays.

Now if he were to go to the gym on Mondays without a plan and see everyone else training chest, he may well think to himself "yeah... okay, my chest definitely needs some work, so I'll train chest today"... instead of training legs, which he wouldn't have trained for a week and a half already.

If he had a training plan clearly stating that he MUST train his legs on Monday, then the chances are MUCH better that he would actually train his legs.

He would remember the reason why he scheduled (or had his coach schedule) leg training twice a week - because he didn't want to neglect his legs.

He also doesn't want to disappoint himself and ACTIVELY change the training day scheduled for the day. That would be like writing in his app or training book "Today I'm training in a way that won't get me closer to my goals."

His goal being, among other things, to not neglect his legs. He definitely won't be doing that anytime soon! That would not be a nice feeling, disappointing himself like that.

So the first advantage of tracking is that you will probably be training with a plan and will not lose sight of your overall goals.

You can fully concentrate on training

Imagine you're in the middle of a set of squats and you ask yourself, "Uh, how many reps did I do last week??? How many reps do I need to do today to have made progress? I don't know anymore... Crap!"

That is not good. If you are so wrapped up in uncertainties, you will definitely not be able to give 100% performance. If you had tracked your training last week, it would have been a huge help in setting a clear goal for the current set instead of being insecure.

So the second advantage of tracking is that you can keep your head clear and fully concentrate on the current set.

You can't lean on fake progression

From week to week, some people may still be able to remember the reps and weights they used on each individual exercise, but from month to month or even year to year, this does not work. This is relevant if you change an exercise and include it in your training plan again after several months.

For example, if you didn't have a leg press in your plan for 5 months, but now you're adding it back in, you may ask yourself the question, "Now, how much weight did I use 5 months ago and how many reps did I do with it?"

Let's say you think you did 10 x 450 lbs 5 months ago and now you start with 10 × 455 lbs. This will work wonderfully. You can continue to increase by 5 lbs per week. At some point you will be at 10 x 500 lbs. You will be very happy that you have improved so much.

But what if you didn't actually do 10 x 450 lbs 5 months ago, but 10 x 550 lbs? Then the 10 x 500 lbs you are doing now is absolutely not a new personal record and you have NOT improved overall. This also explains why your legs have not become more muscular.

You have simply made a " fake progression " during the past few weeks. You thought that you had increased compared to 5 months ago, but in reality you have not. If you had tracked your training, this would not have happened. You would not have rested on your supposed progression.

So the third advantage of tracking is that you don't get to rest on a fake progression and thus push yourself more.

You injure yourself less frequently

If your shoulder hurts after every upper-body workout, you're probably wondering: Which exercise gave me this shoulder pain? Was it the bench press, the lat pulldown, or the deadlift?

If you've been tracking your workouts and noting which days your shoulder hurts, it's relatively easy to tell: You look for a pattern.

For example, if you see that you have had shoulder problems in every session in which you have performed the bench press and never otherwise, then there is a very good chance that the bench press is at fault.

Therefore, you know that you should work on your bench press technique or, if that doesn't help, you should just replace the bench press with another similar exercise. This will then lead to you injuring yourself less often in the future.

You find out the best training time for you

Some people perform best in the morning, some in the afternoon, and some in the evening. If you track your workouts by time of day, you can see exactly which time of day you perform best.

Of course, this fluctuates: some days you may perform better in the morning and some days in the evening. But you can certainly identify a trend.

For example, you may perform better on average in the evening than in the morning. In this case, it is best to train in the evening in the future - provided that you can arrange this in terms of time.

You are less often disappointed

If you keep setting goals that are not at all realistic to achieve, you will be disappointed quite often. Of course, you must not set your goals too low. That doesn't motivate you. They should still be challenging. They should be motivating AND achievable.

How do you find out if your goals are achievable? By looking at your training notes. Imagine you see in your notes that you have increased your bench press by 5 lbs per year over the last few years. During this time you have been eating pretty well and training smart and hard.

Expecting to gain 50 lbs this year would be absolutely unrealistic - even if you eat perfectly and do everything right in your training. A realistic goal would be, for example, an increase of 10 lbs this year.

This is realistic, because you still have a bit of potential to eat even better and train even smarter. And it should also be motivating, because +10 lbs is twice as much as +5 lbs.

Of course, if you hadn't tracked your bench press performance over the last few years, you wouldn't know what a realistic rate of increase might be. Then you might have really expected to increase by 50 lbs and would be needlessly disappointed when you couldn't do it.

So with tracking, you're less likely to be disappointed because you'll be setting realistic (but still motivating) goals.

You'll see if you're improving, and if you're not, you can quickly figure out what you need to do to improve.

Sometimes you don't even realize that you are progressing with your training. Especially when you are very advanced, you will definitely not be able to increase in every exercise from week to week.

You may then see a visible increase only from month to month. This is hardly noticeable and you quickly forget about it if you don't record your achievements.

But when you look at your notes and see that you have improved in all or most of the exercises over a period of time... great! That's nice to see and motivates you to keep going.

Because there's nothing worse than fundamentally changing your training program because you think you're not improving, EVEN IF you're doing really well right now.

If you see in your notes that you are currently just walking in place, then of course you need to change something. Your training notes will indirectly tell you what you should change.

First of all, check to see if you have been working out regularly. If you have not been going to the gym regularly, then that is the first thing you should change.

Then see if your form was good during the exercises you did. If you often see in your notes something like "felt unsafe" or "had to end the set because the bar was wobbling too much", then that's where you need to improve your technique. Then you can also check if you have done enough sets per week.

For example, if you have been performing fewer than 10 sets per muscle per week, have almost never had muscle soreness, and think you could handle quite a bit more, then do more sets, or else do fewer sets if you have been training consistently above your recovery capacity.

So you see, your training notes tell you quite a bit about why you haven't progressed lately and what you can do better.

You won't train in the "wrong" rep ranges

If your goal for an exercise is to do about 12 reps with a challenging weight, you don't want to choose a weight that will allow you to do 25 or more reps. You were thinking something when you chose your approximate rep goal.

Let's say you haven't been on the leg extension machine for 2 months and now you want to choose a weight to use for about 12 reps, so that the last reps are really strenuous.

But you only remember that 2 months ago you did something between 150 and 200 lbs. And was that for 10 reps or 12 or maybe even 14? In this situation, it may very well be that you deviate enormously from your target reps in the 1st working set.

Now you can of course say, "Yeah, that's not bad, because I'll just adjust the weight in the next set." Sure, you can do that, but then you will still have trained well below your goal in one of 3 working sets.

This is not a disaster, but why not choose the right weight right from the first working set by tracking your workouts so that from those notes you can see exactly what weight is appropriate now?

You train harder

Just before you start your leg press set, you say to yourself, "Okay, I'm going to do at least 10 reps, because last week I think I did 9 reps. That way I'll have increased by one rep." Now you start the set. It slowly becomes more strenuous.... even more strenuous, and at the 8th rep it is really strenuous.

At that moment you say to yourself "I don't think I did 9 reps last week. It was more like 8. So now it's enough if I do 9 instead of 10 reps to have increased," and you actually stop after the 9th rep, although you actually wanted to do 10.

Maybe some of you know this: When things get exhausting, we don't really want to push ourselves any further and look for a way to justify ending the set earlier.

In this case, the justification is that we tell ourselves we did fewer reps in the last session after all, so we don't have to push ourselves as much now.

But if we think about it more carefully after the set, we are of course fully aware that we weren't really convinced that we did so few reps in the last session... We had only convinced ourselves of that in order to find an excuse not to have to go out of our comfort zone even more.

If you track your workouts, look at your notes and really see that you did 9 reps last week, then there is no doubt about it: You really did those 9 reps.

Now you will try to do 10 reps. During the set you can no longer come up with the excuse that you are unsure about how many reps you did last week. You know that for a fact.

Accordingly, the chances are much better that you will push yourself to actually do the 10 reps now and thus really make progress. In addition, you do not want to feel the shame of writing a number in your training log that does not represent an increase, even though you know that you could have improved from last week.

So by tracking you end up training harder.

You can train according to complex progression models

Of course, not everyone wants or needs to do this. But if you really want to achieve good results, then it can make sense to train with more complex progression models.

For example, you can periodize your sets. This can look like this: during a training cycle of 6 weeks, you increase the sets from e.g. 3 to 5 sets per exercise.

You can also increase the effort level. For example, in the first week you do all the exercises with 3 RIR, then train from week to week closer to muscular failure, and then in the last week do as many reps as you can in each set (with perfect technique of course).

As mentioned above, you don't have to train like this. But if you want to train like this, then of course you absolutely can't avoid tracking. Well, unless you have a really amazing memory and can keep track of everything. Then of course you can do it that way, too.