Why a Training Journal Makes Sense: Optimize Your Athletic Performance.

A training journal is a powerful tool for athletes and coaches. It helps to document your performance, identify weaknesses and opportunities for optimization, and achieve long-term goals. In this blog post, you'll learn why it's so important and how you can use it effectively. I'll show you how it can help you and give you tips from my experience as an elite athlete to improve your athletic performance.

Why a Training Journal Makes Sense

A training journal is much more than just a few notes. It's about conducting structured self-reflection to optimize your athletic performance and training. Keeping a training journal is often underestimated. It's seen as tedious, time-consuming work and may appear as an additional burden at first glance. But once you've started and fill it out regularly, it will help you progress a little bit every day.

Imagine you're doing strength training with a specific number of repetitions and different weights. If you don't write it down, how will you increase the weight next week? This is exactly where it makes sense to record your training data to get an overview and know how much you took last week.

At the end of the season, you've achieved countless personal bests - amazing! You should be proud of yourself. Now comes the build-up for the next season, and you want to continue improving your performance. With a training journal, you can analyze the past training year, either alone or with your coach. This way, you know exactly what it took to break your personal best.

Recording training data definitely has various advantages for you and is an opportunity for even more performance and athletic success.

Benefits for Athletes

• Tracking current training volume: Keep track of your workload so your coach or you can make adjustments.
• Improving your own performance: Recognize which exercises and training methods are most effective for you.
• Analyzing performances: Discover patterns and trends that help you optimize your training strategy, whether it's training in the morning or evening.
• Overview of personal mood: Find out how your mood affects your performance.
• Recording successes: Document your successes and motivate yourself by seeing your progress in black and white and getting closer to your goal.
• Early warning system: Recognize early on if you're not progressing as desired, reflect, and adjust your training with your coach.

A training journal offers you the opportunity to see your successes in black and white. Often as athletes, we're so focused on our sport that we forget how far we've come and what progress we've made. By recording your training data, you can see this progress and recognize how your training is paying off.

As an athlete, you're often under pressure and exposed to many external influences that you can't control. With a training journal and your own self-reflection, you take more responsibility for yourself and can actively influence your athletic journey. It's worth recording thoughts, emotions, and moments and looking back on them later to find out what helped you in certain situations or what you should do differently next time.

Practical Tips for Keeping a Training Journal

From my time as an active elite athlete, I've learned how important it is to fill out the training journal right after training. It's a special moment of reflection where I record my emotions, performances, and insights. This way, I immediately knew whether I had made progress that day or what I still needed to work on to achieve my goals.

Here are some tips on how you can use your training journal effectively:

• Note every training session: Write down when you trained, for how long, and what performances you achieved.
• Record challenges: Document which exercises were difficult for you and what you want to improve next time.
• Reflect regularly: Look at your entries regularly to identify patterns and trends and make changes.
• Be honest: Document not only your successes but also your weaknesses and setbacks. They are just as important for your progress.
• Set goals: Use your training journal to set short, medium, and long-term goals and track your progress.

Don't see keeping a training journal as a tedious duty, but as a valuable tool for your athletic success. Stay persistent and discover how you can get even more out of yourself through structured self-reflection and targeted analysis. Your training journal is the key to a successful athletic journey. Try it yourself and start today!