Virgin Active blog
Your regular dose of wellness inspiration, fitness and nutrition tips.
"Should I track my workouts and how do I do it?"
7 Apr 2022 18:02PM
by
Virgin Active
Tracking your workouts can be a fantastic way for you to see how your fitness journey develops and monitor weekly changes, as well as identifying anything you might find missing from your routine. It’ll make it easier for you to reach whatever goals you may have and motivate you to stay on track. Here are some of the pros to tracking your workouts, and ways you can do it:
Why do people find it useful to track their workouts?
Tracking your workouts and progress makes you more likely to reach your goals while allowing you to be more time efficient in reaching the goals. If you’re struggling to see progress in your workouts, being reflective on your achievements and how you feel in your body can help you keep going.
You can also be quite flexible in your approach to your workouts through tracking them and can make whatever changes you want at any point. You may have started your current routine to try something new but might actually find yourself wanting to focus on one specific area of your training. By tracking your workout and how you feel, you can even find out what you’re not enjoying so much and easily adapt your routine.
Having your workout progress tracked will also help you stay motivated on your health and fitness journey and remind you about why you are on the specific journey. Plus, they can be great fun to look back on in the future!
Ways to track your workouts...
Writing it down
Take it back to the old-school way and write down everything you want to track about your workout in a notebook; this could be how long you work out for, specific days, equipment used and how long you spent with each one, distance and/or weights. You can even write down your goals for the day, week or month and create checklists or cross out points once you’ve achieved whatever your targets were!
It might also be helpful to write down what you enjoyed and how you felt after training. You can look back at these entries when you’re not feeling like heading to the gym and remember why you started in the first place.
Use apps to track your workouts
There are plenty of apps out there that track general fitness levels or workout specific apps that can help track your workouts such as running or cycling. These can be good because you have everything stored on your phone and can sync it to other devices. For certain types of workouts you may engage in, apps are a better way to track your progress and can show you your results in visual features such as graphs and charts, as well as sending you reminders and tips for fitness or wellness.
Get competitive with your workout buddy!
A little healthy competition never hurt anyone, so grab your workout friends and track how you’re doing in comparison to each other! You can have some fun through seeing who can run for the longest, or get the most burpees done in a specific amount of time. It can also be helpful to have a class instructor assist with tracking your workouts as well as other gym goers in the same position as you, motivating each other to continue to reach their goals.
Why not try tracking your workouts for the next month and see if anything in your routine changes? Let us know on our socials about how you get on!