For the longest time I did not track my results in the gym despite being a student athlete. However, I always worked out with people who were diligent and did track their results so I was always steadily improving, but it was more incidental rather than intentional. It was a peaceful existence, but day by day, not much changes so if you’re not tracking it’s very easy to just believe you’re not making progress. We’ve all heard several times to just trust in the process and that small changes compound. This is all true and it does happen whether you track or not, but believing it and seeing it with your own eyes is not the same.
I’ve been out of the gym for a long time (way too long) and of course I’m pretty weak now, or at least much weaker than I was. I started tracking my workouts with Simple Fitness App which is an amazing FOSS tool. One of the exercises in my weekly rotation is seated rows, which I did the previous week (so 2 weeks ago) at a specific weight for 4 sets of 8 reps. Last week, I walked into the gym, and absentmindedly started doing 4 sets of 10 reps and not only that but I increased the weight. Keep in mind, when I’m at the gym I kind of become a mindless drone, I am mostly just in my own head thinking about other things, then I snap back to reality just to do my set. So by the 3rd set I was very tired and I was thinking to myself:
Holy moly, I am so out of shape. Today is not a good day for me.
Simple Fitness App shows what you did the previous week and it wasn’t until I logged my 3rd set that I noticed I increased both the reps and weight without realizing. After that, I realized I am out of shape, but that day was just a normal day for me and I felt a lot better about myself for being able to do as much as I did.
The point I am trying to make is, logging workouts, studying or progress towards any long term goal is good as long as it doesn’t get in the way of getting things done. A while back while doing some spring cleaning on my computer files, I found old C code I wrote for homework assignments and I saw old videos from high school where I spoke Spanish and I felt like I was watching a different person in both these cases. Day by day nothing changes, but having data to look back on really helps you see the bigger picture.