This time of the year is always a great opportunity for reflecting on the past, planning for the new, and starting new habits. Now I'm probably a bit biased but one of the best (and simplest) habits we can develop is logging our workouts. Regardless of whether you're working out to improve your quality of life or if you're trying to make a run for the Games...tracking our workouts is a great way to track our individual progress. The following is a quick list of 5 benefits of logging our workouts:

If your memory is anything like mine it's far from watertight. Keeping a record of what we've lifted is a great way to make sure we're holding ourselves accountable and not just taking the easy way out because we "can't remember what I did last time".
The process of writing things down, or logging them, forces us to pay attention to the task at hand. Knowing the weight on the bar, the increases between sets, or how a workout made us feel is absolutely invaluable information. It's human nature to want progress, and it's a very difficult process if we don't know where we are.
As a reminder...there are some lifts that we do on a weekly basis, there are also some workouts that we only do once or twice a year. It might be easy to remember the workout we did last week but the workout we did last year though...not so much. Logging your workouts allows you to take the responsibility of committing everything to memory off your hands. One of the worst feelings in CrossFit is repeating a workout that you know you have done...and not knowing if you did better or worse...trust me, I'm speaking from experience on this one.
Regardless of what our individual goals are...they all require a consistent effort to achieve. Keeping a log of our workouts is the 1st step towards the development of consistency in our workout habits, and developing positive habits is never a bad thing.
Motivation is not the easiest thing to come across, on top of that what motivates one person may not necessarily motivate the next. One thing that is universal when it comes to motivation is self improvement. Tracking our workouts and lifts gives us the opportunity to see small & achievable victories on a regular basis. If we take this upcoming Monday's bench press workout as an example....the workout is Bench Press: 1-1-1-1-1. Speaking for the majority we'll all remember our final set...for the sake of this email lets say Johnny Juan Jon got up to 200 lbs by doing the following jumps: 95-135-155-185 and finally 200. Relatively speaking the 185 & 200 were the challenging sets and the first 3 were basically warm-ups. Now say 3 months goes by before we repeat singles on the Bench Press...assuming Johnny doesn't record his workouts he's probably going to resort to his comfort zone of starting at 95 then 135 then 155. Now if Johnny kept track of his workouts maybe instead of starting at 95 he decides to do the following rep scheme: 115-145-165-185-200....even if he still hit the same 200 lbs that he had before he still accomplished more work by increasing his first few sets.

Now there are a ton of ways to actually log and track our workouts. For some people a good ole fashioned pen and notebook / journal work great. In the past we've used Beyond the Whiteboard for as a digital / online platform for logging workouts. Unfortunately their app and general interface isn't the most user friendly and it can be a bit tedious at times. In the theme of 'out with the old, in with the new' I'm happy to announce that we are trying a new platform, SugarWOD, that is much more user friendly and has an application that actually works and is simple to use.

If anyone is interested in trying it the App is a free download that is available for both Apple & Android platforms and I would highly recommend it.