Some athletes have the luxury of a personal trainer or coach to keep track of their training for them, most of the recreational athletes don’t. For this group, it is up to the individual to decide on the future direction of their training.
Fortunately, training for a bike race isn’t like predicting the stock market; past performance has a high correlation to the desired future performance. Therefore the need to record down past performance.
As a good Rule of Thumb for anything: If it’s important, record it down. Physical training isn’t any different, and people have been keeping training logs for a good reason: To find out what they did right.
Our bodies adapt to training over a period of weeks. Over those weeks, many things can occur. Life could get in the way, different training methods could have been used, etc.
Our training log simply helps as to see what we did over a certain period of time, compare it to the results that we gained, and then make changes.
If you don’t have a training log, start one right now. I personally have a text file on my computer in which I record whatever I did. Here’s a quick example from a workout I did not too long ago:
Thursday – 01/04/2010 Core 9-12 reps + 3×5
DB Shoulder: 21kg x 11 + 3×4Pulldowns: 65kg x 10 + 3×4
Bench: 70kg x 8 + 2×2
DB Row: 45kg x 10 + 3×4
Side Leaning Laterals: 12.5kg x 11 + 3×4
—
Bench went to hell suddenly on the 8th rep; lost the groove. Wanted to grind out some reps, but decided to be patient and drive it home on Sunday. On the bright side, everything else went up easily. Will make a note to always place bench as the first exercise to make sure I hit it fresh.
[1]
From that experience, I decided to put benching as a priority.
As a long term example, I recently stopped doing the bench press. This was from observations from previous training cycles: 6 weeks of high volume training didn’t do anything to increase this lift. 8 weeks of High intensity training only gave me a 2kg increase, etc
In fact, I had looked over my training log and realised that my bench press had only increased by 5kg in the last 5 months. Obviously I was getting nowhere doing bench pressing; I wasn’t built for it.
So I decided to switch to weighted dips for my chest training, and sure enough, I’m making a lot more progress with that.
Of course, there’s no set format. As long as you can gain information about how you respond to certain training methods in order to make improvements, major or minor, to your training.
While the research about training has been getting better and better over the years, the fundamentals never change. Regardless of your sport of choice, the path to success is as follows:
- Get informed about the methods available to you
- Pick one that seems suitable
- Try it out for a set period of a few weeks
- Note improvements
- Make Tweaks
- Repeat ad infinitum
Your Training log is crucial to that process, start taking it seriously.
—
[1] If you’re interested in why my training style looks a little weird, check out Myo-Reps using Google Translate (the page is in Norwegian)
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
