Whether you are a competitive athlete or someone just trying to get into a more healthy lifestyle, logging your activities and workouts is a good habit if it’s done in a reasonable fashion with an appropriate goal in mind.  There are many challenges with just getting active or getting enough workouts in and adding one more step seems counter intuitive but you’d be surprised how one can seem to increase the chances of success with the other.

Online tools have come a long way

Goal Setting

First and foremost, logging your workouts helps with goal setting.  When you go through the motion of actually logging and writing down what you did, that extra step makes you think about what you are doing and it forces you to organize what you did into manageable chunks of “activities”.  Productivity gurus usually will profess something along the lines of write it down don’t keep it all in your head, get organized, and set reasonable goals that are tangible.  When it comes to life, many of us can be overwhelmed and we don’t know where to start.  Being healthy or fit is no different.  Whether your goal is to look better, feel better, run that 5K, get the title, whatever – knowing where to start can sometimes be very elusive.  But the simple act of jotting things down forces you to think about things and organize them in a logical fashion.  Even if you don’t have a specific goal in mind yet, this will help you determine what goals are really important for you.  The more likely situation is that you may have a goal that is too lofty or unrealistic initially but if you do an effective job of logging your activities, you’ll invariably start setting intermediate goals which will give you that motivation and sense of accomplishment to continue and eventually reach the final goal.  You may not be able to run that marathon yet, but if you start by setting smaller distances and see that over time you reach those intermediate distances and not only that – you start improving your pace, well then you are well on your way to Heartbreak Hill.

Something to Compare Against

If your head is anything like mine, it’s probably chock full of a 100’s of thoughts, to do’s, worries, and countless other things.  If you do any kind of activity or training, you’ll never keep all the numbers and variables in your head.  In line with setting goals, it’s nice to be able to compare what you are doing or achieving to a minimum past performance.  But why stop there?  With advances in web technology, you can now start to compare yourself against a broader audience.  Whether it’s your friends, a local running club, or an anonymous body of participants…you can now see how you stack up against them.  So what?  Well if you are a competitive athlete, it provides that motivation as well as helps you tailor your workout strategy to move up to the next echelon of athletic prowess.  It can also tell you if you are on a trajectory for injury too.  You can also over do it and put yourself out of commission.  If you are someone who is new to being active and healthy, it serves as a great barometer of how healthy you are and just how much of a priority being active needs to be in your life.  Case in point, if you are a 35 year old and you are in the bottom quartile…you may need to re-evaluate how you spend your time or else you risk having some very serious problems later in life.  Finally, and this probably will go for the majority of us…being able to compare your performance today to something may just activate that drive and desire to keep working out and usually that’s the most important thing.

Peer Motivation

Still remains the #1 motivator for many of us.  You can find it in many ways.  Whether it’s working with a wellness professional like a trainer, joining a running club, or simply making a commitment to a group of friends to log x amount of hours a week…all are forms of making us accountable to others and to this day remains one of the most effective training techniques.  Your logging activity should reflect that reality.  If you are going to employ the peer motivation technique, make sure that your group either does the same or that you have someone looking at what you write.  Positive feedback is a great motivator.  So is having a professional viewing your progress and making sure that you are not doing anything that can be harmful.  In my case, I give rancid negative feedback (better known as talk smack) to my buddies if anyone falls off the wagon for too long.  Whatever works for you.

What Makes for Good Logging

Whatever medium you choose for logging your active lifestyle, it needs to be flexible.  You should be able to log practically anything and still be able to view everything together with some reasonable amount of analytics.  At the end of the day it is about getting some kind of discovery out of that.  Here is an example of what I mean:

day 1 – run a pre-planned route outside

day 2 – do circuit training indoors

day 3 – on the road, do calisthenics in hotel room

day 4 – run on a treadmill

day 5 – Crossfit

day 6 – play a sport for 2 hours

day 7 – dance for 2 hours

So, if you keep a pen and paper…you have to write it all down and calculate how many calories you burned for each activity.  This is where online tools do make a difference.  The trade off is that while most online tools will calculate calories for things they have in their DB, pen paper still gives you the flexibility to log everything that you can possibly do under the sun.  Now across all these days here are some of the analytics I would use to see how I’m doing:

1. how many calories did I burn in total

2. how much time did I spent in these 7 days being active (how does that compare to my caloric burn and more importantly how does that compare to how much I ate)

3.whether I run outside or indoors, what is my pace and is there a difference (does it affect my training for a race that’s coming up)

4.how much weight, how many reps, and what is my average rest period

5.how can I tweak my workouts (like the hotel one) so that I get maximal caloric expenditure in the least amount of time when I’m on the road

These are just some ideas, but you get the idea.  It forces you to think about what you are doing and invariably you start forming goals and habits that are healthy.