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Most people I've seen taking a logbook approach to working out over-train... First of all, if you have time to take notes or carry a water bottle while working

Most people I've seen taking a logbook approach to working out over-train... First of all, if you have time to take notes or carry a water bottle while working out, as far as I'm concerned you're doing it wrong. Pick up the pace. It's almost always just porky nerds who have notebooks. A structured planned mentality to lifting is counter-productive. In terms of how much and how hard to go, you really need to listen to your body on any given day. Some times your immune system really is telling you to take it light and easy and wrap it up in fifteen minutes. Also, it's most effective to dramatically vary routines and volume/intensity quite randomly from a large repertoire of exercises to prevent habituation. This simply doesn't produce useful time series, so notes are pointless. Perhaps the biggest problem with a structured and planned approach to exercise is that it's not playful. It's of the wrong mentality to enjoy yourself.

HeyLaughingBoy 18y ago
There's structure and then there's rigidity. I always took a structured approach (today I'm going to do legs & lower back), but modulated the intensity according to how I was feeling, my energy level, etc. By using that structure, I knew what my plan was and I could avoid overtraining a bodypart. And my notes are useful 10 years later. I can see progression, and the comment "allergies bad today" will explain why I cut sets short, etc. That said, I wouldn't use software to do this. My clipboard served me well for years.
- Alex3917 18y ago
  Excel is useful though because it makes it easy to extrapolate how fast you will be in the future. Just being able to know whether your cardio is improving linearly or logarithmically is huge, along with various muscle groups. It's very hard to identify your sticking points without being able to turn the data into graphs.
pkaler 18y ago
"It's almost always just porky nerds who have notebooks." I've logged every workout I've done over the last 14 years. I squat over 300 lbs and deadlift 450 lbs. My roommate in university was an olympic lifter. The entire team logged their workouts. Serious athletes log workouts.
- kingkongrevenge 18y ago
  I think it's a bad idea to model a personal fitness regimen on competitive athletes. They are typically over trained. Really, they're typically damaging their health somewhat. And again, metric driven discipline is just not the right mentality to bring to exercise for 99% of the population. Also, you should read about high weight dead lifts and spine stress fractures. You are probably damaging your back.
  - swombat 18y ago
    I think it's a bad idea to model a personal fitness regimen on competitive athletes Agreed, but logbooks are not a fitness regimen, they're a simple, useful technique for maintaining control of whatever fitness regimen you pick.
  - jrockway 18y ago
    How do you know you're over-training if you don't keep logs? If you want to be able to think intelligently about your workout (or anything, for that matter), you need data. For me, this amounts to a spreadsheet where I track a few variables. Maintaining it takes 5 minutes a day.
    - kingkongrevenge 18y ago
      Logs won't really help keep you from excess training. You are not a machine; your physiological response to exercise is poorly modelable. You just have to be in tune with your body. There are all kinds of homeostatic forces when it comes to exercise that dynamically push back on increased volume. For example, high volume aerobic exercise can increase your ability to build fat reserves, leading to strongly diminishing returns from running for purposes of the average Joe trying to lose weight. I alluded to this above: your body responds best to randomly varying exercise. Both frequency and type. Take a few weeks off. Then work out three days in a row, a completely different form each day. Then twice a week, and so on. Don't work out on a predictable schedule. It pretty much happens if you listen to your body. This just isn't amenable to logs, but it has proven benefits to making fitness durable and affecting lean body mass. You want enough variety in what you're doing that exact volume and weight for a previous given lift isn't clearly relevant anymore. My point is that the data is just really not going to be all that useful. It's not going to give you any meaningful linear projections. It's not going to tell you whether your body is stressed at a given time. If once a month you want to record your 100m time and how many pushups you can do that's one thing, but tracking each workout is almost surely a waste of time. Just mix it up a lot and go hard when you really feel like it.
swombat 18y ago
It's almost always just porky nerds who have notebooks. Sorry, I don't find that to be true at all.
aaroniba 18y ago
Without some kind of logbook, how do you even evaluate how well you're doing? In my experience, most successful bodybuilders take a scientific approach to their training. The main variables that affect physique are genetics, diet, and routine. Different diets and routines work for different people, so to achieve the best results it's important to experiment. A log book gives you data to learn how to improve your routine. Even your point on the importance of varying routines is best achieved by using a log book. Try a steady routine for 3 months and measure your gains. Then try "dramatically varying" your routine for 3 months and measure your gains. Now you have data to support your own optimal workout plan. Finally, to your point about picking up the pace: most routines involve rest between sets, so if you log while resting then it doesn't slow you down.
- kingkongrevenge 18y ago
  > most routines involve rest between sets Body building and power lifting routines involve rest between sets. The rest is needed to achieve the volume which induces sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. Those guys look puffed up and ridiculous, in my opinion. They're also slow and have diminished hand speed and explosive power. High volume bench pressing, for example, will actually weaken your punch. Capillary density is also reduced and endurance is weakened. Brief and intense routines with very little rest give you endurance, make you fast, lean, and not puffed up. You routinely see chubby guys lumbering around, resting, and then moving some heavy weights. Every time I see some one going for brief intensity they're ripped, and usually among the strongest anyway.
  - mrtron 18y ago
    I really disagree with things you state as facts. Firstly, the different between appearing ripped and appearing 'puffy' or bigger is far more about diet and cardio than anaerobic activity. The guys with abs at the gym are far less about practical strength and more about a strict diet and large amounts of aerobic exercise to put them at an unnaturally low body fat percentage. High volume bench press will weaken your punch? I call bullshit. Tell that to someone like Houston Alexander. Or Rashad Evans tonite, knocking out the best puncher in MMA (and clearly a weightlifter). Brief and intense exercise doesn't give you very little endurance. Instead, it works your muscles, primarily recruiting fast twitch muscles and improving anaerobic efficiency. Lastly, if body building/power lifting routines are making you slower and less explosive, why when I was training as a competitive gymnast were we training with large weight/low reps and weighted pylometrics to gain speed and explosiveness? I always hear talk about 'overtraining' but really I think the huge issue is under nutrition. I trained 20+ hours a week when I was younger as a competitive gymnast and didn't come close to overtraining. Overtraining occurs when serious bodybuilders workout 4+ hours a day, not when you workout twice a week for 30 minutes. Finally, I find your 'ripped is the strongest' statement ridiculous.
seano 18y ago
You start by saying people using log books over-train and go on to say that they should put away the log book and pick up the pace. That makes no sense. Your other points are equally useless personal opinion.
- kingkongrevenge 18y ago
  It makes perfect sense. You just don't understand. There are two separate issues here: 1) Logs aren't very useful; 2) Strength training with substantial rest between sets is inferior to intense routines without rest in many ways. My other points lack citations, but they aren't useless opinion.

HeyLaughingBoy 18y ago

There's structure and then there's rigidity. I always took a structured approach (today I'm going to do legs & lower back), but modulated the intensity according to how I was feeling, my energy level, etc. By using that structure, I knew what my plan was and I could avoid overtraining a bodypart. And my notes are useful 10 years later. I can see progression, and the comment "allergies bad today" will explain why I cut sets short, etc. That said, I wouldn't use software to do this. My clipboard served me well for years.

Alex3917 18y ago
Excel is useful though because it makes it easy to extrapolate how fast you will be in the future. Just being able to know whether your cardio is improving linearly or logarithmically is huge, along with various muscle groups. It's very hard to identify your sticking points without being able to turn the data into graphs.

pkaler 18y ago

"It's almost always just porky nerds who have notebooks." I've logged every workout I've done over the last 14 years. I squat over 300 lbs and deadlift 450 lbs. My roommate in university was an olympic lifter. The entire team logged their workouts. Serious athletes log workouts.

kingkongrevenge 18y ago
I think it's a bad idea to model a personal fitness regimen on competitive athletes. They are typically over trained. Really, they're typically damaging their health somewhat. And again, metric driven discipline is just not the right mentality to bring to exercise for 99% of the population. Also, you should read about high weight dead lifts and spine stress fractures. You are probably damaging your back.
- swombat 18y ago
  I think it's a bad idea to model a personal fitness regimen on competitive athletes Agreed, but logbooks are not a fitness regimen, they're a simple, useful technique for maintaining control of whatever fitness regimen you pick.
- jrockway 18y ago
  How do you know you're over-training if you don't keep logs? If you want to be able to think intelligently about your workout (or anything, for that matter), you need data. For me, this amounts to a spreadsheet where I track a few variables. Maintaining it takes 5 minutes a day.
  - kingkongrevenge 18y ago
    Logs won't really help keep you from excess training. You are not a machine; your physiological response to exercise is poorly modelable. You just have to be in tune with your body. There are all kinds of homeostatic forces when it comes to exercise that dynamically push back on increased volume. For example, high volume aerobic exercise can increase your ability to build fat reserves, leading to strongly diminishing returns from running for purposes of the average Joe trying to lose weight. I alluded to this above: your body responds best to randomly varying exercise. Both frequency and type. Take a few weeks off. Then work out three days in a row, a completely different form each day. Then twice a week, and so on. Don't work out on a predictable schedule. It pretty much happens if you listen to your body. This just isn't amenable to logs, but it has proven benefits to making fitness durable and affecting lean body mass. You want enough variety in what you're doing that exact volume and weight for a previous given lift isn't clearly relevant anymore. My point is that the data is just really not going to be all that useful. It's not going to give you any meaningful linear projections. It's not going to tell you whether your body is stressed at a given time. If once a month you want to record your 100m time and how many pushups you can do that's one thing, but tracking each workout is almost surely a waste of time. Just mix it up a lot and go hard when you really feel like it.

swombat 18y ago

It's almost always just porky nerds who have notebooks. Sorry, I don't find that to be true at all.

aaroniba 18y ago

Without some kind of logbook, how do you even evaluate how well you're doing? In my experience, most successful bodybuilders take a scientific approach to their training. The main variables that affect physique are genetics, diet, and routine. Different diets and routines work for different people, so to achieve the best results it's important to experiment. A log book gives you data to learn how to improve your routine. Even your point on the importance of varying routines is best achieved by using a log book. Try a steady routine for 3 months and measure your gains. Then try "dramatically varying" your routine for 3 months and measure your gains. Now you have data to support your own optimal workout plan. Finally, to your point about picking up the pace: most routines involve rest between sets, so if you log while resting then it doesn't slow you down.

kingkongrevenge 18y ago
> most routines involve rest between sets Body building and power lifting routines involve rest between sets. The rest is needed to achieve the volume which induces sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. Those guys look puffed up and ridiculous, in my opinion. They're also slow and have diminished hand speed and explosive power. High volume bench pressing, for example, will actually weaken your punch. Capillary density is also reduced and endurance is weakened. Brief and intense routines with very little rest give you endurance, make you fast, lean, and not puffed up. You routinely see chubby guys lumbering around, resting, and then moving some heavy weights. Every time I see some one going for brief intensity they're ripped, and usually among the strongest anyway.
- mrtron 18y ago
  I really disagree with things you state as facts. Firstly, the different between appearing ripped and appearing 'puffy' or bigger is far more about diet and cardio than anaerobic activity. The guys with abs at the gym are far less about practical strength and more about a strict diet and large amounts of aerobic exercise to put them at an unnaturally low body fat percentage. High volume bench press will weaken your punch? I call bullshit. Tell that to someone like Houston Alexander. Or Rashad Evans tonite, knocking out the best puncher in MMA (and clearly a weightlifter). Brief and intense exercise doesn't give you very little endurance. Instead, it works your muscles, primarily recruiting fast twitch muscles and improving anaerobic efficiency. Lastly, if body building/power lifting routines are making you slower and less explosive, why when I was training as a competitive gymnast were we training with large weight/low reps and weighted pylometrics to gain speed and explosiveness? I always hear talk about 'overtraining' but really I think the huge issue is under nutrition. I trained 20+ hours a week when I was younger as a competitive gymnast and didn't come close to overtraining. Overtraining occurs when serious bodybuilders workout 4+ hours a day, not when you workout twice a week for 30 minutes. Finally, I find your 'ripped is the strongest' statement ridiculous.

seano 18y ago

You start by saying people using log books over-train and go on to say that they should put away the log book and pick up the pace. That makes no sense. Your other points are equally useless personal opinion.

kingkongrevenge 18y ago
It makes perfect sense. You just don't understand. There are two separate issues here: 1) Logs aren't very useful; 2) Strength training with substantial rest between sets is inferior to intense routines without rest in many ways. My other points lack citations, but they aren't useless opinion.