How to read your own training log

Compare the same thing to itself

The useful comparison is one exercise against its own history: this week's top set against the same exercise a fortnight ago, at the same reps and the same effort. Everything else is noise dressed as data.

Comparing sessions as wholes rarely works, because sessions are not comparable. One had a rushed warm-up, one followed a bad night, one was done at a different time of day. The exercise is the unit that holds still.

Four things worth looking for

None of these is dramatic, and that is the point: progress is mostly undramatic:

• Same load, more reps, same effort. The clearest good sign there is.
• Same load, same reps, lower effort. The same work costing less, which is progress arriving before the numbers move.
• An exercise whose log has gaps. Not a performance problem — an attendance one, and a different fix.
• Effort climbing while the numbers stay flat. Usually fatigue accumulating, and usually a reason to take a lighter week rather than push.

The comparison that misleads

Comparing yourself to the plan is the trap. The plan is a forecast written before the fortnight happened; measuring against it mostly tells you how optimistic you were, not how you are doing.

Your log compared against your log is the honest version. It has no opinion about what you should have done and cannot be disappointed in you, which makes it considerably more useful than memory.

Read it before the review, not after

Ten minutes in your history before the fortnightly proposal arrives changes what the proposal is. You stop being asked to approve something you cannot evaluate, and start checking whether it matches what you already noticed.

It also catches the occasions where the coach read the log correctly and the log was wrong: the week you entered the dumbbell weight per hand instead of the pair, or logged a session you did not finish. The coach cannot know. You can.