Exercise Diary

Tools of the Weight Loss Trade: Your Exercise Diary

One of the most effective ways to stick to your goal and start losing weight today is to begin keeping an exercise diary. An exercise diary is beneficial for many reasons. First, you can set endurance or weight lifting goals for yourself and monitor your progress toward these goals over an extended period of time. You will never forget how much weight you lifted last week, how many repetitions you did or how long it took to jog your neighborhood last time. Secondly, an exercise diary will help you keep track of your progress in relationship to your weight loss goals by monitoring measurements, body fat and weight over time. Lastly, an exercise diary is a clear and concise personal history so that you may simply look back and see what worked for your weight loss plan and what exercise routines were less effective.

Exercise Diary Dynamics: Determination and Discipline

Thanks to the computer age, exercise diaries, or logs, can be kept far more efficiently as a spreadsheet database on your home or work computer. Specific weight loss software and online journals can also be used to even further streamline this process. The more user-friendly and accessible your exercise diary is, the more determined and disciplined you will be about maintaining it. The results of your hard work will visibly occur faster and actually be documented completely.

Your exercise diary should include each physical activity of the day followed by duration/resistance level or incline (if on a machine)/distance/repetitions and the calculated calories. Each day should have a calorie burn total. Calorie calculators can be used to determine the number of calories burned unless you are using a cardio machine that displays the information. At the end of each week, give yourself a progress report. This includes the net total in endurance and strength from the previous week as well as all of your measurements taken. Some measurements you may want to include in your exercise diary from the beginning are waist, hips, bicep, thigh, weight and body fat percentage. Make sure the measurements are taken at the same place each time and that you weigh yourself at the same time of day.

Excel with your Exercise Diary

Nothing will make you want to maintain your commitment to weight loss than hard-proof encouragement of positive results; results you have documented and can account for. A diary is evidence of your progress and it also prevents you from the temptation of lying to yourself. We often wonder why we haven't lost any weight when we've been going to the gym every day for a month. With an exercise diary you will see how much (or how little) you are accomplishing at the gym in all that time and have a better idea of how much more you need to be exerting yourself. The optimal way to keep an exercise diary, of course, is to also maintain a food diary simultaneously. At the end of each day you can then compare your caloric intake to your active caloric expenditure.