Benefits of keeping a training diary
I have been keeping notes of my workouts in a diary for a year now. I took this advice from Arnold Schwarzenegger, as he writes in his book “The New Encyclopedia of Modern Body Building” and I really benefited by this idea.
Since I update my diary almost everyday, I could easy go back in time and see my previous workout plans, and the pros and cons of them. I try to document as much information as possible regarding my workouts, such as, the body parts I trained on a particular day, the exercises I did, the number of sets for each exercise, the weight I lifted and the number of repetitions I did with a particular weight. In addition, I also write about my calorie intake before and after the workouts.
I have had my shoulders injured during a workout sometime in March last year, and I am still recovering from it. I even had to undertake a physiotherapy program for two weeks, which helped a lot in decreasing the recovery period. It is sad that I could not continue it for a longer period due to some office workload.
It has been a week since I resumed my workouts; my shoulders are still painful and therefore, I have to cut down on my upper body workout extremely. The break due to shoulder injury was about ten months, and I completely forgot the workouts I used to do. That is where my training diary helped. I reviewed it, checked out the weekly plan I had, and analyzed what went wrong. Therefore, I quit some of the upper body workout that could worsen my shoulders, such as Dumbbell Flys. I do lightweight exercises, as my goal is to get some strength in my shoulders before I start building mass.
In short, I would advise you to keep a training diary, as you can benefit from it.
You may also want to checkout my next week’s workout plan.
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