Your Training Log

by Mark Rippetoe | April 16, 2024

A process is defined as “a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular objective.” “Training” is the process of increasing your physical capacity to perform. Whether your performance is in a competitive sport or staying out of a rest home, the process is the same: start where you are now and increase the load a small manageable amount on a regular basis, so that you gradually accumulate the adaptation you're training for. The process for this mechanism is encoded in your DNA, and is therefore within the reach of everybody. If you're not improving your performance, you're either not trying, you're doing it wrong, or you've been training so long that the fruit has already been picked.

“Practice” is also a process, but practice increases skill in performance through the accurate repetition of movements that are already within your physical capacity, whereas training increases the actual physical capacity by causing the tissues of the body to adapt to a higher work output. Skill increases more slowly than physical capacity, but both can be improved faster than you think they can if you view each as a process.

Since training is a process used to accumulate a physical adaptation, each action or step is predicated on the previous one, and ultimately on all of the previous actions that have resulted in the current accumulated level of adaptation. It is therefore imperative that you know what all of the previous actions were, so that subsequent actions can correctly drive an adaptation. They must be incrementally increasing along a gradient that forces the body to adapt: over time, training must get harder. But the incremental increases must not exceed your capacity for adaptation: if the gradient is too steep, you cannot adapt – you just get stuck.

Your training log regulates this process. Every time you record today's workout you compare it to the last workout, and the process-aspect of training becomes obvious. Your training log is graphic evidence of your increase in performance. As you become further advanced in your training, it allows the organization of the variations in your workouts that drive continued post-novice progress. And if you get stuck, the data allows a more experienced eye to help you determine the cause of the problem.

Do not be one of these fools who think they can remember all their workouts. This is physically impossible. And my advice is to record your workouts in a paper log book – something that cannot crash. Your phone can crash, like your tablet or your laptop. You know this is true, so just buy a notebook and keep it in your gym bag, and record every workout set-by-set before you leave the gym, every time, without exception. Record everything – date, day of the week, time of day, dietary status, medical status, injury status, rest status, lab results, misses, makes, form errors, injuries, equipment, both personal and gym, spotters, their compliments and criticisms, and your own impression of the work.

Your training log is the database of your training, and is the most important factor controlling your continued progress. If you don't know exactly what you did, you can't know what actually happened, and you won't know what's going to happen next. If something good happened, you need to know, and if something bad happened, the data can tell you why.

If you don't keep a training log, you're just fucking around in the gym. Which is fine if that's all you want to do, but it's not as productive as actual training.