The Importance of Charting Your Workout

I’ll be honest with you; I haven’t always been the best at keeping track of what I was doing. Calendars, planners, charts, all of those things just didn’t tickle my fancy. I was the kid who thought he’d just remember things and never forget what he had to do. It wasn’t until college that I realized how important charting your workout is. How are you ever going to progress unless you know exactly how much weight and how many reps you did the last time you exercised? I’ll put it bluntly: you’re not. Don’t be the one that looks around aimlessly thinking about what exercise they’d like to do next. Have a plan, execute, and get out of there feeling accomplished. Maximum results come from maximum effort. Put as much effort into your exercising as you do with anything else. It is your life we’re talking about here.

Why Charting Your Workout Helps

Properly charting your workout is important for many reasons. One of these is knowing the order of your exercise. There’s nothing like seeing that person at the gym just staring around, trying to think of what they want to do next. Instead of wondering , you should KNOW what to do next. Order of exercise is important in stimulating your muscles the proper way. Whether it’s pre-exhaust, post-exhaust, or all compound movements, you should know what order your exercises are in. At Vertex Fitness, we train our clients in a systematic progression of exercises and workouts. Nothing that we do is random, it all has a purpose. Exercise should always have a purpose, and that purpose is to make the body stronger.

Charting Your Workout Makes it More Effective

If you aren’t charting and keeping track of your weights and repetitions, how will you know if you’re progressing? Gradually increasing the resistance (weight) is one of the most important things if not the most important in getting stronger. We as humans are adaptive organisms. We adapt to everything. Doug McGuff, M.D., defines exercise as a specific activity that stimulates a positive physiological adaptation that serves to enhance fitness and health and does not undermine the latter in the process of enhancing the former. For anything to be considered exercise it needs to stimulate a positive physiological change in the body in a safe manner so that injury is prevented and health improves. If we overload the musculature of the body beyond what it’s accustomed to, than it will be forced to change by building bigger and stronger muscles. By not keeping track of the weights that we’re using, we will never know exactly how much resistance is needed to stimulate the muscles during exercise.

At Vertex Fitness, we keep track of EVERYTHING. By keeping a detailed chart for every individual client, we can keep track of the different workouts that they are performing. We take a systematic approach to exercise and keep the workouts rotating so that a client will never be performing the same workout consecutively. We also chart the seat settings, weights, and repetitions for every client on each exercise. This ensures that we know exactly when to move up their weight as they become stronger and need a higher resistance to stimulate their muscles to continue to grow. If you’re ever going to continue getting stronger, then charting your workout is 100% necessary.

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