The Benefits of a Training Journal & Plans

I can say without a doubt that one of the most powerful resources I’ve created for my personal health and wellbeing has been my training plan/diary. It has been a constant point of reference that has gone through multiple iterations and now contains an almost diary like record of my training right from day one. It’s a powerful daily reminder of where I am, where I’ve come from and where I’m going.

I believe it’s crucial that you keep a record of your training. Having such a plan enables you to monitor and track your progress and it gives you a tangible record of your progress and depending on the level of detail you want to input you can track right down to individual metrics e.g., running times or weight lifted.

You can also plan for vacations, early starts, and have a record of just how much you did. You can use it to spot problems in your training schedule as you increase your knowledge, perhaps you’re over reliant on cardio or your strength and conditioning workouts aren’t aligned with your weight loss goals.

Think of your training plan like a diary in that it will vary daily, and you can record basic information or very detailed information e.g. interval times or number of reps, you can even list how you felt on a given day, what the weather was like and how you slept. Information is power and the more you measure the more you can actively manage and look to leverage for your personal goals.

Why is my running pace slightly down? Oh yes that’s right I had a cold for three days two weeks ago that really took it out of me. Don’t just stop with tracking your training, perhaps even more crucial is to track your diet.

Your training plan can be as crude as a few sheets of A4 paper taped to the back of your bedroom door or an excel workbook with a sheet for tracking every metric you can imagine.

The important thing is that you keep some sort of record. It will serve as a motivator and as a source of pride when you look back and review how far you’ve come in the past few weeks, months and even years.

Consider the following questions before you create any training plan:

Do you know what you want long term?

Are you clear in your own mind what you want long term? I don’t mean which a-list celebrity body you want to emulate. I mean do you know why you’re doing this. Why should you care about health and fitness, what’s going to motivate you when it’s raining out and your tired, or the last thing you want to do is go to the gym, but you know you have to.

What will get you to keep going and not give up? It could be family, it could be friends, it could be deeply personal, and you might want to do something like a triathlon or a challenge of some sort. Only you can answer this and you might need to take some time to figure it out. My answer was that I want work my ass off to be as healthy and fit as I can and at the end of my days to be proud of what I’ve achieved. I also had a list of people to prove wrong.

Do you know what you want short term?

Just as important as the long-term goals but often overlooked are your short-term goals. What do you want to achieve in two weeks, two days, two hours? It is small victories and having the courage and the commitment to make the right choice when you must.

That might mean walking into your kitchen and not grabbing the snack bar. That’s a victory especially if it had been a habit of yours. What are your short-term goals and what do you need to do to achieve them?

Do you understand that you will face challenges, and these are not reasons for you to stop these are reasons for you to continue?

To grow you must hurt it is as simple as that and the more your challenge hurts the more you will grow when you beat it. That food that you cannot resist, if you can get past that addiction or bad habit you will grow so much in terms of your discipline and confidence in yourself.

You must understand that if you’re long-term goal is to live day to day at a healthy body weight and be capable of doing X, Y and Z in terms of your physical capacity that the various elements i.e., training, diet, mental and time management that are going to need to be learned, practiced, and mastered over years.

Don’t be put off here, you need to be aware of these things, Chances are you’d become aware just as soon as they become roadblocks. Now you have the knowledge, and you know it’s required so when you do face this challenge, you’ll already have an idea on how to beat it. Discipline and consistency need to be at the forefront of your mind-set.

Do you fully understand that the buck stops with you? Despite what you’ve told yourself in the past, despite the excuses you’ve fallen on before and possibly presently; do you now understand that this change will only happen if you make it happen. There is nobody else in the world that will do this for you. Only you have that power. Don’t blame anyone else, don’t make excuses and don’t lie to yourself. If you mess up, acknowledge it, try and learn from it and make sure it doesn’t happen again by modifying your plan or your diet if you have to.

Are you aware of your own strength and weaknesses?

If you know that you’re not an early riser, why have you planned to do spinning at 7AM three days per week? That doesn’t make any sense; you’re setting yourself a difficult objective for no good reason.

Once you’ve made training during that slot a habit start checking your available time again for another slot and set another goal to find a slot that will enable you to train twice a week now and so on.

What if you know that at 8PM at night you’re always wide awake, you’ve loads of energy, and you don’t know what to do with it. In fact, you don’t get asleep until the late hours because of this. Go to the gym at 8PM then, work with your body and not against it and work smarter not harder. This will get you to both your short- and long-term goals. 

Do you want to do this plan?

Does your plan excite you? Is there some event that takes place every year that you’re now thinking, if I can do this consistently by the time that event comes around, I’ll be in very good shape?

Is there a dress or a suit that you’re positively dying to wear for a big show or a party that you know you probably can’t quite pull of just now, but if you follow your plan, you’ll be able to wear that dress or suit in all its glory, make sure your plan excites you? 

Starting to Plan

It’s quite frankly impossible that from the outset anybody could have the answers to all these questions but sometimes being aware of the potential pitfalls can make your mind work in the background to try and solve them for you. Like an exam knowing the question helps you formulate an answer before you take your test.

Your plan can be as complex or as simple as you like. Everyone will have their own preference, some may wish to buy a small hardback copybook and scribe their plan and their performance in there, and others will opt to digitise and create their plan on a computer and print this out.

Whatever approach you take is completely up to you, but you must track what you do. You might not feel like righting down, ‘I felt like rubbish today, things didn’t work out like I planned’.  but you should. When you start to gain momentum and develop something of a routine, before you know it, you’ll have 6-8 weeks’ worth of a record of your daily activities and how you felt.

Reading back over this can give you an excellent insight into the progress you’ve made. We are so busy in our day to day lives we often forget things almost immediately after they take place. I always write down what I did that day, how I felt and if there were any other factors that influenced my mood or feelings. For example, an argument with your partner, or if there was some sort of trouble in work or bad weather and heavy traffic making the commute to work an absolute nightmare.

Writing down your thoughts like this serves more than a singular purpose, you obviously have a record of the day that was, but you can in fact alleviate some of your stress and worries by effectively talking out your worries with yourself. You can use your diary to add in points to remember e.g., a birthday next week you need to get a gift for. Sometimes my training diary was mainly used to track my workout progress and other times I used it to record difficult times, challenges I faced or when I was feeling very low and just couldn’t shake it.

Plan Templates and Personalisation

I encourage you to personalise your plan as much as you can, are your kids your big motivation? Copy in pictures of them to reflect on each time you see them. Do you draw inspiration from the ancient Spartan warriors or maybe the samurai? Whatever gets your blood pumping feel free to add it to your plan, give it a personal touch. With every new plan you’ll decorate it a new way.

At the end of a year’s health and fitness you might have four highly personalised training plans like diaries of your life. Someday you might show these to your kids and inspire them to also do great things.

Why start from scratch when you can take my training plans which I’ve spent years refining and use them yourself for free. Every training plan and diary is available on my website for free, no sign-up, no requirement to ‘subscribe’ or any of that nonsense, follow the link, download what you want and that’s it.

You can take these plans and copy them exactly or tailor them to your own specific needs. They’re simply laid out and easy to use yet highly effective. You’ll need to adapt these to your own style and preference but that’s easily done.

Guidelines on Effective Planning

If you’re going to start from scratch and do your own thing, good stuff go ahead and create your plan/diary exactly as you want it. The following guidelines might help you in your design.

Keep your plan to roughly 8 weeks initially; this way you can modify your plan accordingly if you move to different forms of training and it also gives you milestones as completed 8 weeks of training consistently is a very impressive feat.

Make your plan so that it’s quick and easy to update. The last thing you want to have to be doing is to find time to fill out a training report card at the end or the start of every day.

 If you use one of my templates use a password to protect your worksheet, you might put some deeply personal things in there and that’s nobody’s business but your own, password protect or hide your plan. It’s for your eyes only. Embarking on a journey like this is deeply personal don’t’ share it out this is your diary.

Back up your plan e.g., email it your Gmail at the end of every week. Gmail is free to use, and chances are your nowhere near using up the maximum allotted storage.

I have had a total hard disk failure before with zero recoverable files; I lost about 4 months of my thoughts, feelings and what I did.

Remember, chin up, chest out and handle it.

Yours,

Stephen