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"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 lb

by 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.

by pkaler 18y ago

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.