How to Track Your Fitness Progress: Tips and Tools for Measuring Your Success

New year, new you!
New Year’s resolutions are notoriously tricky to keep. Without guidance, it’s hard to know how to track fitness progress. You start strong, excited by the possibilities, and you might see some great progress in those early days or weeks.
But inevitably, fitness progress slows down and maybe even stops. You stop seeing strength gains or speed improvements or weight loss. You plateau.
Hitting a fitness plateau isn’t a bad thing – because as long as you are consistently moving and performing the feats of fitness, you are doing better than everyone on the couch! But a fitness plateau can create a mental block and hinder your desire to continue your fitness journey.
So, what’s the best way to keep a fitness routine?
Our expert recommendation is to track your fitness by keeping an exercise journal or log. This article will explain how to track fitness progress and how tracking exercise can help you maintain a feeling of accomplishment as you journey toward your health and wellness goals.
What is the purpose of a fitness log?
We’ve talked in previous articles and in interviews with wellness experts that fitness is a feeling. It’s not about how you look; it’s about how you feel about yourself.
But when it comes to setting and achieving fitness goals, feelings are subjective and can be misleading. Speaking from personal experience while training for a half-marathon race, days when I feel the worst often tend to result in some of my best-paced runs!
Learning how to track fitness progress begins with identifying objective measures of fitness. Objective, or quantitative, measurements involve numbers with an established unit. What weights did you lift, in pounds or kilograms? How many repetitions and sets did you perform? How far did you run, in miles? What was your average pace, in minutes per mile?
This doesn’t mean that subjective observations aren’t important! They help us identify issues that can influence how we perceive our workout; “I slept poorly last night” is a subjective observation. But because it can be difficult to compare one night’s poor sleep to the next night’s poor sleep, it’s helpful to think about how you slept in quantifiable terms – “I slept four hours last night.”
The purpose of a fitness log, then, is to serve as a place to journal or record both objective (measured) and subjective (felt) observations to help you track your fitness progress.
With your fitness log, you can then track what you did the previous day or the previous workout, which can help you determine what exercises to do today.
Using a fitness journal can help you plan future exercises. It’s the perfect place to write down ideas for a new exercise to try – say you saw someone using a new machine at the gym and you’re gung-ho to try it next time, or you watch a YouTube video that recommends a specific set of exercises to work that one muscle group you’ve been avoiding. You can try to remember those new exercises, but if you’re like me, then chances are you’ll forget! It’s better to record them in your fitness tracker to incorporate into your next workout.
When you know how to track fitness progress, you can plan out your progression. Say you have a set of six different dumbbell exercises, and you power five of them with ease, but struggle with completing all reps of that last exercise. You can record what exercises you did at what weights and make a note that you should consider increasing the weights next time on those five power exercises while maintaining the weight on the sixth one.
Although you might think you’ll just be able to remember all the exercises you need to do, it’s easy to get lost in the moment and forget your workout plan when you’re trying to overhead press the equivalent of your bodyweight. Having a record of your planned and performed exercises keeps you on track and from getting lost in the weeds of all the possible kinds of exercise movements.
How to track your workouts
So, if you’ve decided to keep a fitness log, then you’re probably wondering how to keep track of workouts. And what does a fitness log exactly look like? Depending on your fitness goals, a fitness log can take any number of forms, from physical paper logs to digital programs.
The simplest form of a fitness log is the classic notebook and pencil. Just simply write down your planned exercises for the day, and when you finish each exercise, record what you did and any relevant data points, such as repetitions performed on a given weight machine, or distance/pace that you ran, walked, or biked.
Save space for recording notes about your fitness session; this is a good place to write down those subjective feelings that might have influenced your workout. Did you start your workout in a good mood that helped you push through the heavier weights? Write that down. Did you notice any discomfort or pain during a certain exercise – signifying a need to focus on form or even take a break from that exercise? Write that down. How much water did you drink? Write that down!
If you have a personal trainer, then discuss your goals and what information might be helpful or even necessary to record. A trainer might already have premade charts for you to track your fitness.
If you’re extra nerdy like me, then a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets can serve as a digital database for your fitness milestones to help you visualize your progress with graphs and charts. You’ll be able to look back over previous weeks and see how much progress you’ve made.
For the smartphone savvy, there are several apps you can use, such as MyFitnessPal, Strava, or Fitness+. If you’re a gym member, then see if they have a membership app that can help you plan and record your fitness activities.
Different apps have different features and not all apps will be right for your fitness goals. For example, I use a running app that maps my running routes and records areas where my pace slows down. I find this mapping feature helpful so I can understand how my form might change on different terrain in my neighborhood and how I can better approach those areas in the future.
Some apps also include food journals and calorie-counting features, turning your fitness journal into a two-for-one workout/weight tracker!
If you’re extra tech-friendly, then you might find wearable tech like an Apple Watch, a Fitbit, or a Garmin that can be paired with a smartphone app to help you reach that next level of performance.
Why is it wise to keep a fitness log?
Fitness is a journey; it’s never a destination. Along that fitness journey, a fitness log becomes a diary of your journey – what you did, what you saw, what you felt. So why is it important to evaluate your fitness levels periodically?
Think of your fitness journey as a cross-country road trip. Do you drive your car straight through without stopping? No! You need to stop periodically to fill up with gas, check tire pressure, grab some food, or check into a hotel for the night. In the same way, a fitness tracker is a way to let you know when you need to check in on your progress to refuel, reset, or recover. When you set a health and wellness goal, a fitness log helps you monitor your progress and think about how to continue moving forward.
When you are regularly checking your fitness progress, you can avoid those fitness plateaus to help pinpoint areas of improvement and celebrate moments of achievement along the journey toward better health and wellness.
Need inspiration for how to start tracking your progress? Then explore Thorne’s wellness guides, which offer sample plans for incorporating exercise into your daily schedule, along with recipe ideas and nutritional advice for rookies and experts alike. For a free calendar to help you track meals and exercise, download Thorne’s Weight Management Guide to get started – the tracker pages are at the back of the guide.
Need more fitness inspiration? Then read, watch, and listen to tips from Thorne’s partners on how to perform at your peak and turn those New Year’s resolutions into routines.