Why Workout Logs are So Important

Workout logs are an undervalued part of endurance training.  Workout logs provide a more complete and full picture of what actually happened in a given workout, and these details help athletes and coaches plan better and more effective training over time.  They also help athletes develop more effective strategies for both training and racing.  All athletes should carve the time to log notes on their workouts if they want to reach their fullest potential.

Ready to start training? Check out our Coaching and Training Plan options:

• Training Plans
• Customized Training Plans
• Personalized Coaching Services

Learn more about Full Circle Endurance: https://FullCircleEndurance.com/

Submit questions to be answered on the show: https://FullCircleEndurance.com/podcast/

Reach out to Coach Laura Henry: Hello@FullCircleEndurance.com

Disclaimer: The information shared in this podcast is for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or health goals. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you heard on this podcast. Reliance on any information provided is solely at your own risk.

Chapters

• 0:00 Opening
• 0:16 Introduction
• 0:44 What is a Workout Log?
• 4:21 What Should Be in a Workout Log
• 7:55 Why Workout Logs are Useful & Important
• 14:59 How to Use Workout Logs
• 19:07 The Bottom Line
• 20:01 Closing

Transcript

(0:04 - 6:50)
Hello and welcome to the Full Circle Podcast, your source for insights into the science and art of endurance sports training and racing. I'm your host, Coach Laura Henry. So many athletes think that training is about the doing of the workouts. 

This is true, but training is about more than just doing workouts or checking the box. Training is about how athletes mentally engage with their workouts and about a bunch of other elements that relate to and impact endurance sports training. A workout log is a tangible representation of an athlete who is mentally engaging with the training process. 

So what exactly is a workout log? A workout log is an app, a journal, a notebook, a spreadsheet, or a diary that you use to track the details of your workout, including your workout metrics. And this includes some or all of the following time, distance, heart rate, cadence, power, elevation, lap breakdowns, and more. What happened during your workout, your thoughts about your workout, and how you felt during your workout. 

A workout log is much more than just pressing the start and stop button on your Garmin. You want to pick the medium that works best for you. Some athletes prefer digital mediums, such as a platform like Final Surge. 

And that's what I use with the Athlete's Eye Coach. Others find that an analog medium, such as a physical notebook that they can actually physically open up and flip through, works much better for them. No matter which medium an athlete chooses, a workout log is what helps athletes take stock of the other elements besides the checking of the box or just the doing of the workout that relate to and impact their training. 

When I say that so many athletes think that training is about the doing of the workouts, I'm really referring to age group athletes. This is because elite and professional athletes all record workout logs. There isn't any possible way that someone can rise to the elite or the professional level by just checking the box or completing workouts and never logging notes. 

Athletes at that level need to know what they do, what works, what doesn't work, and they need to have it available for them to refer back to. And just because this is something that elite and professional athletes do and need to do, doesn't mean that it's not applicable to those of us who are age group athletes. There are some behaviors that elite and professional athletes engage with that are not necessarily appropriate for age group athletes, but this isn't one of them. 

Like many of the behaviors and the habits of elite and professional athletes, there's a lot that we can learn from and take away from what they do and apply it into our own training. And so we can incorporate this habit of recording good workout logs into our own training. And this is especially true if we want to make progress, see results, and reach our full potential. 

Over the years, I have literally begged athletes to leave workout notes on their workouts. And over the course of my career, I've coached over 125 individual athletes who have hired me for one-on-one coaching services. I've also coached honestly hundreds more when you account for the group programs that I've coached, but more than 125 individual athletes have hired me for one-on-one coaching services. 

And just to be clear, that's not 125 athletes at one time. That would be impossible and crazy. But 125 individual athletes have come and gone over the years on one-on-one coaching services with me. 

And based on my work with all of those athletes that I've ever worked with, I know for sure that fewer than 10% of age group athletes actually record thoughtful notes about their training and racing. Yes, I am serious. Less than 10%. 

I actually went through and did the calculation as I was preparing for this podcast. Some of the athletes that I've worked with have left notes, but there might be something along the lines of this felt good. This was fine. 

I felt tired today. And comments like that, while they're better than nothing, technically, they're not detailed enough to provide real context or comprehensive feedback that I can act on or that I can really utilize as their coach. And quite frankly, these aren't sufficient notes, even for the athletes themselves. 

A good workout log contains more than just objective feedback, such as a data file or database numbers about a workout. As I love to say, you are human, you are not data. So just having files sync over from a device such as a Garmin isn't sufficient. 

It's not enough. A good workout log contains subjective feedback and details such as how did you feel? Was there anything abnormal that could have impacted how you felt during the workout? What number on the Rating of Perceived Exertion, RPE, scale did this workout feel like? And we use a scale of one to 10. What did you consume for fueling and hydration? What time intervals did you consume your fueling and hydration? What quantities of fueling and hydration did you consume? What was the weather like during your workout? What were the conditions of the course? What were the road conditions? What were the water conditions? What gear did you use during your workout? You can also include any funny tales or things that happened during the workout and anything else that helps to complete the picture of what happened during your workout. 

For those kind of miscellaneous or broad categories that I just talked about, there are some questions that I recommend asking yourself as you reflect on your workout and as you consider what to write in your workout log. What did I do during this workout? How did I feel during this workout? Was anything going on in my life that could have impacted how this went, whether that was good or bad? What sensations did I experience during this workout? What information would be useful for me to have from this workout to look back on in the future? What am I likely to forget about what I experienced during this workout if I don't write it down really soon after I finish the workout? What things of interest did I see or did I experience during this workout? Is there something entertaining that happened on this workout that I want to remember? Will I find something about this workout amusing when some time has passed? Or is there something that my coach would get a chuckle out of? I especially appreciate those when athletes leave them. And ideally, workout logs should be completed on the same day that the workout is completed. 

For the most accurate record of what happened in a workout, workout notes need to be completed on the day that the workout happens before you go to sleep. You may think that you will remember a lot of the details about what happened in your workout and that you can record the details later on in the week or on a different day in the future, but the truth of the matter is this. You will not remember everything you want to or expect you might remember if you put off this task until later.

(6:50 - 8:46)
There's actually a reason for this. This isn't just me saying this. It's not just an opinion. 

There are a lot of things that happen in the body during when we're sleeping, and memory processing and storage are just two of them. Writing things down, which stores thoughts outside of the physical body and the physical mind, signals to the brain that they are important and that they should be remembered. If we don't send our brain that signal that something is important, then the brain discards the information in its sorting process during sleep, and it doesn't allocate it for long-term memory preservation. 

In short, writing post-workout or post-race, if it's a race, notes after the day that the workout or the race is completed will never, never be as accurate or as detailed as they could be if they are recorded before you go to sleep on the day that the workout or the race took place. So not only is actually recording workout notes important, when you record them is really important for accuracy and so that you have a good record to look back on. Workout logs are incredibly useful and important for athletes of all experience levels and all ability levels from beginners right up to world record holders. 

The true value of a workout log lies in its ability to be a reference or a guide for you in the future. You can look back on what you've done both in the short term, maybe in the last days or the last couple of weeks or even the last few months. And you can also look back in the longterm, maybe even a year or more in the past and use what you're looking back on to make informed decisions about what you can and you should be doing in both your current and your future training. 

You can more accurately compare your results from similar training sessions or in different training cycles preparing for similar events. So perhaps you trained for a marathon in the past. You can look back on the notes from your previous marathon training and use those in your current marathon training.

(8:47 - 18:18)
Workout logs also encourage accountability and this is really important for maintaining motivation and consistency over the course of one's training. If we rely on our own memory alone, that's not as accurate and it's not as sufficient as if we have a log that shows us what did we do? How did we actually feel? Workout notes can provide insight into why something happened, whether that something was good or whether it was bad. Did you have a niggle? Did something go really well? Was your workout the worst thing you've felt in many months? How did this workout compare to a similar workout that you've completed recently Without notes, there's no context. 

And without context, we can't ever fully understand what happened, let alone why it happened. So notes are really important for providing context for this greater insight. Notes also assist athletes and coaches with pattern recognition. 

This is a self-awareness building technique when athletes are deploying it. And for coaches, it's really important so that they get to know their athletes that they're working with really well. Understanding your habits can help you plan your workouts, your overall training, and help you develop awareness about what you actually do versus what you think you do. 

Other patterns that you can observe from workout logs include whether you feel better or worse on certain days of the week, whether you feel better or worse with different types of workouts scheduled in a particular sequence. For females of child bearing age, it can provide insight whether you feel better or worse during certain phases of your menstrual cycle. And you can also, for example, see perhaps maybe you get niggles after you complete certain types of workouts or a certain sequence of workouts or certain timing of workouts. 

So it's really important to have a workout log so that you have this big picture, not only for the individual workouts themselves, but how those workouts are all playing together and fitting into the greater context of a training plan. Building on how workout logs provide insight into why something happened, whether that's good or bad, and how they assist with pattern recognition, workout logs can provide early warning signs or signals that an injury may be brewing. This is really helpful if this happens. 

Because obviously, why wouldn't we want to try to prevent an injury before it actually happens? At this stage of my coaching career, I can often see injury potential in an athlete's workout notes before the athlete even sees it themselves and definitely before the injury becomes a full-blown injury. And when I detect this, I can adjust things so that the athlete has a lower probability of developing a full-blown injury. And it's not necessarily any one thing. 

This is something that's been learned from years of experience and looking at thousands of athlete data files and reading thousands of workout notes. But at this stage, there's just things that I can see and what athletes are saying or the feedback they're providing alongside their data that indicates to me, hey, we might need to change some things just so we just mitigate this injury risk. The athletes who I've coached who were or are not good or consistent about logging workout notes, honestly, get injured more frequently than those who do. 

This is because I don't hear anything from these athletes until they are actually injured or until a niggle is too far gone to prevent it from becoming a full-blown injury. It's too late for me to intervene or change things to lower that injury risk. So athletes who log good notes really have a better shot at staying healthy, which is awesome. 

Detailed fueling and hydration notes are really important in a workout log. And this is especially true for athletes who are training for long course events, such as a half marathon, a marathon, an Ironman 70.3 or an Ironman. Workout and race fueling and hydration is so, so individualized. 

Detailed notes throughout training are necessary to help develop an effective fueling and hydration strategy that will work in future training and, which is likely the most important thing for athletes, on race day. Athletes need to log specific granular details about fueling and hydration because if you need to make adjustments to what you did for fueling and hydration, you will be making those adjustments on a granular and a micro level. You will not necessarily be making big, broad changes. 

You might be tweaking how much fuel you consumed or what time you consumed the fuel at. You might be slightly adjusting the quantities of the hydration that you consumed, or maybe you're going to tweak the product or the flavor that you tried. These adjustments are not huge. 

So we really need to have these granular details, these, you know, really specific notes so that we can look back and make these micro adjustments so that at the end of training, we have this really solid and effective fueling and hydration strategy. That's going to be great for the athlete during their goal race. Detailed notes about fueling and hydration include, but are not limited to what you consumed, what time intervals you consumed it at, what quantities you consumed at each time interval, the total numbers of what you consumed and other details, such as if you like the texture, the flavor of the nutrition or hydration, and did you like the mechanism or the method that the fueling and hydration was delivered with? So for instance, did you like the water bottles you were using? Did you like the hydration vest you were using? Did you like the packets that the nutrition came in? Or did you like how you package the nutrition yourself, the fuel yourself? Those are all important notes to take stock of. 

Here's something that may be hard for you all to hear. Workout logs are so important that if you quote unquote, don't have the time and listen, you do have the time. You just aren't valuing it enough to make the time. 

If you say you don't have the time, then you can make sure that you have time by cutting five minutes off the in your workout, cut the workout, create the time and log some notes. Yes. I'm telling you to miss part of your workout. 

So you have time to log thoughtful reflections and workout notes. Yes. It is that important. 

Yes. It is so important that it's more valuable than getting in the full plan duration or the full plan distance of your workout. That's how important these notes are. 

If you complete the workout and you don't put in notes, the workout isn't technically complete. That's been my experience because doing workouts without logging notes is missing a valuable piece of the puzzle. And this is especially true. 

If you have specific goals and or time-based goals, the athletes who I coach, who have achieved the best results, whatever best results means to that athlete consistently log notes after they complete their workouts. The athletes I coach who do not consistently log workout notes, they do. Okay. 

Honestly, they do. Okay. But they don't do as well performance-wise again, relative to them and their goals, their abilities as the athletes who consistently do a log thoughtful notes. 

This is not a coincidence. What I have observed is that athletes who consistently log notes are going to be more self-aware because they are consistently engaging in self-reflection and honing the skill of and athletes who consistently log notes who have a coach are going to get better coaching from their coach because the coach is going to have more information to act on, to give feedback on, to make decisions from, and to plan training from. Input determines outputs. 

If an athlete's input to their coach is good, the output from their coach is going to be exponentially better. I say this to every athlete who contacts me about coaching. And again, remember, I beg athletes to write workout logs and to give me subjective feedback. 

I am constantly saying, help me help you. I want to help athletes to the best of my ability. All coaches do. 

And an athlete's input helps me and all coaches provide better feedback and to help athletes better. Good workout notes enable coaches, including me to get a more complete picture of what happened during an athlete's workout. So here's an example of how workout notes help provide that kind of context to coaches. 

A few years ago, one of the athletes I work with logged a bike workout, and he said it felt like an RPE3 rating of perceived exertion of three on a scale of one to 10. The workout was planned based on power and the percentages of his functional threshold power, his FTP that were planned should not have translated to RPE3. They should have gone to a higher RPE than that. 

But by the numbers, the workout was executed perfectly. When I looked at the file, he hit all the percentages of his FTP that I planned for him in the workout. But as we dived into how he felt, which I did by asking follow-up questions, once he logged that his RPE was a three, I realized that this workout was actually too easy for him. 

And that told me that he was ready for a new functional threshold power assessment, which we scheduled for the following week. And sure enough, once we completed that assessment, we determined that he had had a 4% increase in his functional threshold power. If this athlete hadn't logged notes about how he felt, I never would have known what really happened in that workout. 

And I would have thought that everything went as planned and was fine during the workout, and I wouldn't have changed anything about his training. But as a result of him providing a good and thoughtful workout log, his workouts after that particular workout were much more dialed in and precise for where he currently was at that time in his training. And that helped him to see progress, gains, and it ultimately helped him reach his goals much better than, and much more successfully than if he hadn't provided that feedback. 

Workout logs are not just for athletes who have coaches. I know I've talked a lot about how workout logs are great for athletes who have coaches. And obviously that's because I am a coach who works with athletes, but they aren't just for athletes who have coaches.

(18:18 - 19:26)
They're for self-coached athletes as well. And honestly, my humble opinion is that in many ways, workout logs are even more important for self-coached athletes than they are for coached athletes. And that's not saying that they're not important for coached athletes. 

I'm just saying that if you don't have a coach, it's even more important that you keep workout logs. Because if you're a self-coached athlete, your coach, that would be you, also benefits from having notes that you can look back on, that you can get this bigger picture, that you can get this more broad perspective. When you do something similar in the future, you can look back on your workout log and see how things went, how you felt. 

And that can give you some ideas about what will be best for you to do in your training. You can use your logs to help you plan your workouts and to plan your training and to refine what you're doing so that you have the highest probability of success come race day. Workout logs are a very underrated part of an athlete's training and success. 

In my experience, age group athletes in particular undervalue workout logs. But I really believe that workout logs are just as important as the doing of the workouts themselves. Without notes about how a workout went, a workout honestly isn't complete.

(19:26 - 20:17)
So if you consistently log notes on your workouts, keep that up. That is a great habit. Don't lose it. 

But if you don't consistently log detailed notes on your workouts, consider what advantages and enhancements this practice might bring into your training, your racing, and your overall experience as an endurance athlete. All athletes should carve the time to log detailed and good notes about their workouts. Logging these notes will enable you to better and more precisely dial in your training, develop effective strategies, improve your skills, and reach your full potential over time. 

That was another episode of the Full Circle Podcast. Subscribe to the Full Circle Podcast wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. If you like what you listen to, please be sure to leave us a rating and review as this goes a long way in helping us reach others.

(20:17 - 20:45)
The thoughts and opinions expressed on the Full Circle Podcast are those of the individual. As always, we love to hear from you and we value your feedback. Please send us an email at podcast at fullcircleendurance.com or visit us at fullcircleendurance.com backslash podcast. 

To find training plans, see what other coaching services we offer, or to join our community, please visit fullcircleendurance.com. I'm Coach Laura Henry. Thanks for listening.