Adam Asks: It's common to hear coaches say you should keep a training log/diary, but very little is said what these logs and diaries are supposed to look like. My question, what should they look like? What are all the details I should be keeping track of? How long should it take? I've heard a number of times, it's important, but I've never been told how to use one or why.

Greg Says: My opinion in general is this: if you don’t record your workouts at minimum, you can’t argue you’re serious about what you’re doing. As far as how long you should use it… as long as you care about training. I’ve been keeping training logs without a break for over 25 years.
 
A training journal can be strictly utilitarian, or it can be multidimensional. Starting with the utilitarian end of the spectrum, you absolutely have to maintain records of your training. Without them, you’re going to be eternally spinning your wheels and making little to no progress because you’re essentially just throwing darts in the dark, constantly bouncing from new idea to new idea, and never establishing any consistent routine. Equally importantly, you have no real way to evaluate what works and what doesn’t, and no way to gauge progress when it slows and it’s no completely obvious week to week.
 
At minimum you need to be recording the basic figures of your training sessions: exercises, sets, reps and weights. This is something that should be organized in a clear enough way that you can relatively easily look back to any given time period as needed to find information you’re looking for. In other words, use a consistent format and date entries clearly and prominently.
 
To this, you can add quite a bit. This is a chance to reflect on what you’ve done, what you’ve learned from it, what you need to change in order to improve the results, what you’re proud of, etc. There are three things I ask my lifters to write about after each workout: What am I proud of from today’s workout? What do I need to work harder on next time? What are my goals for my next workout? Make sure these are all answered specifically and clearly.
 
Personally, I record all of my own and my lifters’ training electronically in Excel spreadsheets. This gives me a number of advantages: It’s neat and organized and I can read it (my handwriting isn’t stellar); I can easily locate specific training cycles, competitions or dates based on how I name the files (with the starting date and the name of the competition it’s working into); it makes it possible and easy to track not just exercises, sets, reps and weights, but it’s clear what the contemporaneous PRs are, and I can automatically calculate the relative intensities of each weight, the total volume of each exercise, day and week, etc. It’s an extremely dense source of easily accessible and readable data.
 
This starts with the prescribed program each week that I print out when coaching in person to make my notes at the time of training, or annotate for remote athletes as I hear from them.
 
In addition, I make pretty extensive notes in various places in these documents regarding specific performances of an exercise, more general observations, notes to myself about what I need to change next time, etc.
 
I can look back at these records when writing programming and know exactly what each lifter has done to ensure we’re actually progressing in all of the little things that are so easily forgotten about but drive the big things. I can use them to reassure a discouraged lifter by showing objective proof of progress. They offer a huge benefit to any athlete or coach.