Sometimes we wish measurements didn't exist... like on your hinge profile (sorry short kings). But most of the time they are more useful than not. We start using measurements early on in life, from comparing your slice of cake to your siblings, to make sure you're still the favourite child; to tracking your height against a doorframe in order to make sure the Weetabix are working.
As we get older and focus our attention on more serious pursuits, such as going to the gym, training, working out, however you phrase it, some of us often neglect a low effort, high reward measurement task: tracking your progress. This blog outlines three key reasons why tracking your progress in the gym is simply invaluable.
Before we go into that, you may have noticed that the title of this blog has some Shakespearean influence, which is ironic as Shakespeare himself was a terrible tracker. No diary, no notebook, no surviving letter in his own hand. The gap between 1585 and 1592 is known as the "lost years" precisely because there is no documentary evidence of his life during that period. Luckily for him he had his own "tracker," you could say. More of this at the end.
1. "I'm improving"… "But how do you know?"
Imagine a friend tells you they're getting better at maths. Now imagine a second friend telling you that their maths scores have gone from 58% to 80% in 3 months, and that the marks they dropped were almost all in the same topic. One of those friends knows exactly where they stand, what to work on and how to improve; the other just has a feeling.
The uncomfortable truth is that these feelings are often wrong, or at least far away from the truth. A systematic review of 187 studies found that the correlation between self-reported and directly measured activity averaged just 0.37.[1] More simply put, the similarity between what people say about their own physical activity and what a device actually records is mediocre at best. We are not neutral observers of our own effort. How can we be? You're the one doing push-ups at 6am while your partner hogs the duvet upstairs; of course you're going to remember the effort. But remembering how hard you worked isn't the same as knowing how consistently you did it.
You can't improve what you don't understand. Research analysing 122 behaviour change interventions involving nearly 45,000 people found that self-monitoring stood out as the strongest individual technique associated with successful outcomes.[2] Programmes that combined self-monitoring with at least one other self-regulatory technique produced roughly double the effect of those that didn't (0.42 versus 0.26).
Back to the maths example: feedback is one of the most powerful influencers on progress and learning ever measured. A more recent meta-analysis of 435 studies confirmed the effect and found something useful for us. Feedback has a larger impact on cognitive and motor skill outcomes than on motivation or behaviour.[3]
Improvement starts with feedback. Tracking your progress in the gym is simply a way of giving that feedback to yourself.
2. Taking aim
I'll start with another analogy.
When archers go into a field, they don't pick a tree that sort of looks like their ex or high school bully. There's a target, it's a known distance away, and the rings mean something. The target is specific and measurable; as it happens, those two words are represented by the S and M in SMART goals. SMART goals are a widely used framework for setting goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. The corporate world loves SMART goals, but for good reason.[5] In other words, they turn a vague ambition into something concrete: rather than saying "I want to get stronger," you might say "I want to increase my squat from 100 kg to 120 kg within six months." Now you have a clear target, a way to measure your progress, and a deadline to work towards.
"I want to get stronger" is not a target. It's a direction. And the difference between the two is one of the most replicated findings in psychology. Three decades of research show that specific, difficult goals consistently outperformed telling people to give it their best effort, with effect sizes across meta-analyses running from 0.42 to 0.80.[6] The conclusion is simple and blunt: asked to do their best, people simply don't.
But here's the part that usually gets left out of the motivational-poster version. Locke and Latham identified five things that need to be in place for a goal to actually improve performance: clarity, challenge, commitment, feedback, and a level of difficulty that matches the task. Just as we mentioned in section 1, feedback is one of them.
A goal you can't measure progress against isn't just a slightly weaker goal. It's missing one of the things that makes a goal useful in the first place.
Tracking is what turns an intention into a target. "Bench more" becomes "add 5kg to my top set of five by the end of the block." One of those gives you something to aim at. You can miss it, realise you've missed it, and change what you're doing. The other just sits there, vaguely true.
3. Don't look at the past, unless it's your logbook
Nostalgia is a wonderful thing, especially when you're with friends and a few beers in. Reminiscing about the good old days can turn a boring garden party into a blissful one, until someone starts a card game that no one asked for. Looking at the past can feel good, but when is it useful?
In training, it is progressive overload, and it's completely dependent on a record. What did I do last week? And then by extension, what am I aiming at today? The progression doesn't have to be a load. It can be reps, slower tempo, and form improvements. A trial of 43 trained lifters found that adding reps at a fixed weight and adding weight at fixed reps produced similar muscle growth over eight weeks, with each approach modestly favouring its own specific quality.[7] It's great that there are several dials to turn, but it's also useless to you if you can't remember which dial you turned last Tuesday and by how much.
Set a goal, see where you actually are, compare the two, then change what you do next. That's section one. Control theory is the name for it, and it's what those self-monitoring studies were doing: giving people something to aim at, showing them where they stood, and letting them adjust.[8]
So, to track or not to track?
Four hundred years on, most training diaries are about as full as Shakespeare's. Luckily for Shakespeare, someone else was keeping track. Philip Henslowe was recording the performances, the payments and the success of the theatre around him. Shakespeare might not have kept a diary, but someone was keeping the receipts. It's probably safe to say if Philip Henslowe was a gym rat, he would have approved of SYNCT.
The question was never really about logbooks or spreadsheets. It's whether you want to know.
Training without a record isn't "relaxed training." It's guesswork. You do the work, but you lose the information that comes with it. You can't tell a plateau from a bad fortnight, or a programme that isn't working from a programme you simply aren't following.
Write it down. Then, six months from now, go back and read it.
That's when it pays.
At SYNCT, we believe it pays to track. Actually, scratch that. We know it does. But you shouldn't have to pay to track.
