Best Practices for Online Logging of Exercises and Workouts

Logging a workout or an active lifestyle has clear benefits for all walks of life and fitness objectives.  It forces you to get organized, spot trends to fix or benefit from, it also helps you define reasonable goals that in their achievement perpetuate a positive cycle.  Everyone’s logging strategy can be a little different but there are few best practices worth considering to really help you tailor your logging strategy to fully suit your needs.

Logging application needs to be flexible:

online journal vs. spreadsheet

The biggest tradeoff between most online tools and the home excel spreadsheet/notebook, is the flexibility factor.  In non-techie language, the more flexible the tool needs to be the more complicated the architecture that supports it has to be.  For example there are very few sites that allow you to log both outdoor and indoor workouts with the same level of efficacy.  For example, think of all the variables that go into defining a circuit training based workout: reps, loops, time, weight % of max, % of weight, rest period, total loop time, etc.  Most sites can only allow you to track a few variables which is why most people still use an excel spreadsheet or an actual notebook.

be wary of sites that are too specialized

Most sites use advertising as a revenue model, so they tend to be interested in attracting a niche demographic or sport.  That coupled with the technological hurdle mentioned above, you tend to see that few sites are able to cater to someone who is interested in cross-training, multi-sports, or just leading an active lifestyle in general.  Another part of the problem is that the content required to maintain a vibrant community needs to be abundant, recent, and credible.  This is not an easy task.  So the solution is either to put in a technology platform that supports user generated content or hire a massive editorial staff.

framework has to be in place

On the other hand, the downside of having too much flexibility is that it can make a site too difficult to use because there is so much going on.  From a human factors perspective, an information framework needs to be in place that is intuitive and repeatable.  The ideal online tool has obvious places where logs, free form journal entries, applications, information, etc all reside.  It’s a time commitment to learn how a new site works and once a user learns to do something, it should be repeated as many times as possible.

With FiVi we’ve learned all too well that you can’t build and institutionalize every possible piece of functionality on your site.  Hence the importance of what I like to call “free form” journaling.  The idea is that it should be as easy as writing in notebook in free hand.  Blogging is great for this and with the smart use of tags, you can now organize your journal entries in a way that is logical for you.

No matter how hard you try, you shouldn’t be able to lose it:

Now I know I’m not the only person to have had a hard drive crash or you changed your work computer but forgot to transfer all of your files.  Whatever the reason is…online is nice in the sense you can always access it (assuming it is as flexible as a spreadsheet of course).  But of course you should be able to download and take your data with you.  It is yours after all.  I’ll be the first person to say we don’t have that on FiVi.com – but I promise we will as this is something I definitely believe in.

Sharing is caring and more importantly very motivating

Believe it or not, logging is not only just for you.  Like many things in life, it helps to get outside perspectives.  I share routes with my friends because I get bored of running in the same places.  Also when I picked up cycling, I didn’t know where the popular routes for cyclists were in my area.  Same goes for workouts.  I like to see what workouts my friends are doing and then tell them what they are doing wrong (just kidding ;-)).  In all seriousness of course, I don’t think that I know everything and I’m always on the lookout to try new stuff and so should you.  But the most important thing is that if you do work with a professional, a log may be one of the most valuable tools you use.  A good trainer that is motivated to get you results should encourage you to keep a journal not only as a means to track and evaluate progress but to further instill positive energy and the sense of accomplishment.

It doesn’t have to be an exact science

In developing FiVi, one customer’s insight completely blew me out of the water and I’m sure that they were not the only ones to feel this way.  This talented runner told me that she didn’t want to start logging because she was afraid she would get too compulsive about it and want to log everything exactly.  Ok, so I would never ask you to do anything that would cause so much consternation but I will say that the real benefit is not tied to nailing the micro-fractional details of what you do.  In biology there are always so many variables that affect what happens to our bodies (sleep, temperature, hormones, mood, genetics, etc) that to log to the smallest minutiae is a classic example of diminishing returns.  But on a macro scale, logs tell us a lot.  How many miles did you log last month?  On average how many days do you rest?  On average what are your times when the temperature is above 75 degrees.  These are the questions you want to answer not within each individual workout but over time and this information in the proper hands can really net some results.