Magic Paper: Your Weight Lifting Log

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Many casual exercisers, and even some hard-core bodybuilders who should know better, question why they should bother keeping a log of their weight training workouts.

Part of my job as a coach is to convince them that a weight lifting log is a "magic paper" second only in importance to the weights themselves for making rapid and steady progress in building muscles.

You might think it will be easy to remember, from one workout session to the next, such things as which exercises you did, how many pounds you lifted for each, how many sets and reps you did, etc. That's what I thought when I started out weight lifting. Boy, was I was wrong.

I would go to the gym one day and then, on a return visit just two days later, find that I had only the haziest recollection of which exercises I had done before, not to mention specifics such as poundage and reps. I'm sure I spent many a workout treading water or even drifting backward because I was not increasing my "load" properly. How could I, when I didn't have the data from earlier sessions to serve as a benchmark?

A weight training log will give you a baseline from which to work. The baseline will change from week to week or even from session to session as you make incremental adjustments upward in pounds lifted and/or sets performed and/or repetitions.

A log will also make you more effective in selecting the exercises you want to do during a given session. For example, if you do lunges on Monday, you might want to do reverse lunges instead on Wednesday, then return to lunges on Friday. Both are great for building up leg muscles, but they do it in ways opposite to one another. Alternating them is the best way to get maximum benefit from both. Without a log, though, you can easily forget which one you did last time and which one you should be doing now.

A weight lifting log is a great motivator. When you can look back on entries from a few weeks or months ago and see how far you've come - how you can deadlift a weight that would have seemed impossible a relatively short time earlier - you will feel both proud and enthused all over again.

If there ever were a magic piece of paper, a weight lifting log is it. If you're not keeping one, then I beg you to pack paper and pen in your gym bag and start today.

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