An old Chinese proverb says, “the palest ink is better than the best memory.” Writing goals and plans down on paper is the first step towards achieving them. “If you talk about it, it’s a dream, if you envision it, it’s possible, but if you schedule it, it’s real.” When every part of your fitness and nutrition programme is penned down, the results it produces is amazing.
Hopefully, you’re already writing down your goals, workout programmes, training schedule and menu plans. If you haven’t yet, then that’s where you must begin.
Once your training schedule is in writing, the step that takes your results to the next level is to keep a training journal. There’s no way you can intelligently make progress from one workout and one training cycle to the next if you don’t keep written records.
Training journals are a powerful motivational force because they create accountability to yourself. If you share your journal with a coach or training partner, then you’ve instantly created double accountability — first to yourself and then to someone else. Put your journal on the web like many of our inner circle members have done, and then you’ll have massive accountability and motivational leverage.
If you like to use one of those fancy journals with all the columns and rows for sets, reps, etc already printed on them, or if you like to keep your nutritional intake in an electronic online journal, by all means, use them! But for starters, a plain old notebook will work just fine.
Your journal must contain, at the minimum: Date, exercise, sets, reps, and weight lifted. However, you can be much more detailed and creative with your training journal.
You can even “turbo-charge” your training journal by adding a rating scale to a number of objective and subjective measures. What gets measured gets done… But what gets “graded” gets done even better.
Here are some (but by no means all) of the things you could include in your journal:

Objective & Physical Measures:
Day/date
Goals for this workout
Time started
Time finished
Exercises performed
Number of sets
Number of repetitions
Amount of weight used
Tempo (repetition speed)
Rest intervals
Went to failure?
Goals for next workout
Cardio: type, duration, intensity/Heart rate, calories burned, perceived exertion
Time to bed last night
Time out of bed/hours of sleep
Sleep quality
Energy level

Subjective & mental/emotional measures:
(rate yourself on a scale from 1 to 10, or yes or no)
Recovery from previous workout
Discipline
Positive attitude
Support system in place
Concentration during work out
Read goals/affirmations (how many times)
Visualisation/mental rehearsal
Quality of sleep
Level of stress (or relaxation level)
Scheduled and set goals for tomorrow's workout?
Look better this week?
Got tougher today?
Overall performance today in the workout as well as at work.
If you don’t get to 10s straight away, don’t worry. Very few people do, and no one does it 100 per cent most of the time. It’s not necessary or even possible to be perfect all of them, but there’s nothing wrong with striving for excellence and asking yourself.
You can very easily identify weak-link areas in your training and nutrition when you rate your performance in multiple areas. The theory of multiple constraints, proposed by Eli Goldratt, says that between you and any goal you want to accomplish there is a limiting factor, or constraint, which acts as a bottleneck or choke point which ultimately determines how quickly you will reach your objective.
There may be one area of weakness which is the only thing holding you back, and you can’t fix a weakness if you don’t know you have one. Your job then, is to identify the bottlenecks or limiting factors and the only way to do that is write down and analyse your performance in multiple areas.
Choose the skills, disciplines, results and actions that are critical to your success in reaching a particular objective, and record them in your journal.
Be sure to rate yourself in areas that are not just physical. Peak performance experts say that the primary obstacles between you and your goals are very often mental or emotional. If you are only compiling sets and reps, you may be missing the real choke point.
A training journal can give you feedback, provide you with motivation, and hold you accountable.
But a turbo-charged journal can help you identify, improve and break through what could be the one roadblock that’s really holding you back from reaching your true potential.