Tips and Benefits for Keeping a Detailed Fitness Journal

A fitness journal is more than just a diary for buff gym-goers. It’s an incredibly useful tool that will ensure you’re meeting all your goals and making the most progress possible from all your hard work. If you’re not entirely sold on the idea, we’ve prepared some tips and benefits for keeping a detailed fitness journal that will better show you how helpful these little things can be.

Outlining Your Goals

When you start your fitness journey, it’s easy for your mind to become overly preoccupied with your final overarching end goal, whether that be losing weight or building muscle. Focusing on nothing but that long-term goal can be discouraging when it feels so out of reach. With a fitness journal, you can keep track of all your subgoals that will help you make steady progress and reward you with smaller victories along the way. You can also make a clear plan of how to achieve those goals and refer back to them whenever you need them, making your routines much easier to keep track of.

Tracking Diet and Exercise

Another tip and benefit for keeping a detailed fitness journal is that you can keep track and make notes of how well you’re doing with your diet and exercise. Keeping track of the number of calories you intake is crucial for any fitness goal and being able to keep a log of your performance on machines—such as a home gym rowing machine, treadmill, or stair climber—can show you where you excel and what you need to improve upon for the most beneficial performance. Unless you have someone else to observe your performance, it can be hard to recognize and correct mistakes (you could solve this by having a reference.)

Expressing Your Emotions

This may seem like a strange one at first, but with a fitness journal, you’ll have a chance to express your emotions and evaluate how you feel after your workout. Your mood, mental, and emotional state plays a larger role in your motivation and performance than you may believe, so being able to identify how you felt on good days will help you find what really works best for you, while logs on bad days will help you identify the cause of your strife so you can hopefully solve it for next time.