The Benefits of Keeping a Fitness Journal

How Tracking Your Workouts Can Improve Your Health

Fitness and health go hand in hand, and most people incorporate a workout regime or fitness plan when trying to lose weight or reach a specific health goal. Staying on track with nutrition and workouts can be challenging if you do not see the desired results.

An excellent technique to keep yourself accountable is tracking your workouts with a fitness journal. Numerous benefits come from writing down your progress to help with longevity and a better sense of yourself. Here are some advantages of tracking your workouts and some suggestions for the best ways to keep yourself accountable.

Focus and Motivation

One of the biggest reasons people struggle during workouts is because they aren’t working as hard, or they’ve hit a plateau in their weight loss and aren’t working past it in their exercise. When you write down your workouts, you can see how you progress and push yourself to do a little more as you gain strength and find the workouts to become more manageable.

The journal motivates you because you can already see what you’ve done when you exercise. You can make plans to move forward, do more reps, or go a little bit longer in length for the next workout.

Helps You Set Goals

Consider what you want to achieve with your workouts. If you can set goals, even small ones, to reach, writing them down is a sure way to help you get them. In fact, studies show that people who write down their goals frequently are 42% more likely to achieve them.

For example, if you’d like to lose body fat, you can track your weight loss once a week in your journal. Consider writing down other things to track in your journal alongside your workouts, such as your meal plan or nutrition, to ensure you’re getting the proper fuel. 

Keeps You Accountable

Accountability is the best way to ensure that you’re progressing as you go, and you need to be realistic and honest with yourself. If you’re writing everything down, you can see differences in what’s working for your exercise and what’s not, based on where you’re progressing in your goals. 

Keeping yourself accountable by writing in a handy weekly planner with design options allows you to create new habits and refine your lifestyle. You may understand you need to make healthier choices or alternate your workouts, and the planner is an effective tool to help you do that.

How to Track in Your Journal

It’s not enough to just have the planner or journal with you; you should have a plan for tracking your workouts. What you choose to write down in the planner is entirely up to you as you go, but here are some suggestions to help get you started:

• Day/time
• Your weight
• Your workout
• Details of your exercise (how many reps, miles,y minutes, etc.)
• How you felt
• Your sleeping duration

It’s also helpful to include pictures of your progress, so you can see the difference that’s being made from one week or month to the next. Another good suggestion to help keep you going is writing down inspiration, such as quotes, memes, blogs, or posts you see for reference when you need to boost yourself.

Some other good tips to get the most out of tracking your fitness in a journal include:

• Try to write in it every day; set aside a specific time and stick to it – you only need maybe five minutes to get things written down, so it won’t take much time.

• Be honest about your progress – if you skipped a workout or just did a light stretching day, it’s still okay that you didn’t do a full-on workout!

• Set small goals that can help you reach bigger ones. For example, if you want to lose pounds to be at a healthy weight, set smaller goals and habits with your workouts, maybe just a couple of times a week, then three, four, five, etc. Set goals to build up in your exercise so it doesn’t overwhelm you.

• Reward yourself when you reach milestones or small goals – it’ll help to keep you motivated and ready to tackle the next achievement!

When you track your workouts in a fitness journal, you’re sure to obtain better results with the ability to see your progress. Writing can also be highly beneficial for your mental, physical, and emotional health, so you’ll have a more well-rounded and healthy lifestyle.