A tour of my gym notebook

After getting tired of overcomplicated and expensive workout apps, I went back to basics with pen and paper.

I’ve been working on learning how to lift weights in the gym for the last few years. But only pretty recently – over the last year or so – I feel like I’ve started to get the hang of it.

My goal: get stronger, put on weight, and to acquire a stockier build.

There’s two things that have clicked for me lately which has made my progress start to speed up:

• I wasn’t eating enough. I need to be consistently eating 3,500 (or more) calories per day. Once I started tracking my calories (I’ve been using Calory, a simple and free calorie tracking app), and did a bit of research, I realized I simply needed to step it up and just eat more

• I didn’t have a workout plan. It’s simple and obvious, but you need to track what you’re doing in the gym and make sure you’re slowly but consistently adding more weight over time

Today I want to expand on this second thing: the process I’ve created for tracking workouts.

There’s an app for that! …Right?

I’m the kind of person who tends to think that technology can solve any problem, so I set out to try to find an app that can help me with tracking and planning my workouts at the gym.

After a few months of trying different (often subscription based and frankly overpriced) apps, I settled on StrongLifts. It was simple and was geared towards weightlifting specifically.

for the first few months, it seemed perfect and I was really excited about it but eventually I got fatigued of having to pick up my phone after every single set, tapping buttons, and scrolling sliders to change the amount of weight I was lifting.

On top of that, it had a $50 a year subscription fee. So I was just like: screw this.

I grabbed a notebook and was like, I’m gonna go old school.

My gym notebook process

I was looking around on YouTube cause I was like “I bet some gym guy has an amazing and simple process for maintaining a gym journal” but honestly, I couldn’t find much helpful content in regards to this topic.

So I decided to invent my own. Here’s how it works:

• Each day gets its own dedicated page. This makes it easy to look at the previous day to see how I did when planning today’s workout

• Before I start working out, I list out each movement I plan on doing down the page. Often in abbreviated form (BP = bench press, DL = deadlift, etc.)

• Beside each exercise I write the amount of weight I plan on lifting. For example: 45 means I’ll load a 45 lb plate onto each side of the bar. This frees up my mental capacity so I don’t have to do arithmetic to figure out the total weight. Personally, usually all I care about is if I am lifting less, the same, or more weight than I did last time, not total weight lifted

• I draw five circles under each exercise. One for each set I plan on doing

• Then, after each set, I write down how many reps I completed in each circle. Since my goal is to put on muscle mass, I am doing heavy amount of weight with low reps. I only do five reps per set, and if I fail and only do 3, then that means I need to keep working on that amount of weight and I keep it the same the next time, rather than add more

• And finally, I often use the extra space on the page to leave small notes about whether it was easy or hard, or other things like if something I ate negatively affected my performance (as shown above on page left)

I’ve been finding that this simple setup has been working great for me and has alleviated a lot of frustration I was feeling from trying to use over-engineered apps.

All I need is to show up with my notebook and a pen, and I have everything I need.

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Read (or listen!) to my interview about simple web design tips for startups

Big thank you to Payten Jackson for hosting me on her new publication, PJDAY.

Last week, we collaborated on an article and short podcast about tips for startups building on a budget. She starts off by stating:

In my experience, founders, entrepreneurs, and builders are guilty of the following,

1. Creating their own website on a third party platform too quickly.

2. Hiring every freelancer and their dog to touch their website whenever they need a quick fix.

In my opinion, these paths can get messy, and difficult to remedy the further you get away from your core product.

Thanks for having me, Payten! Can’t wait to see where you take it with this project.