How to Track Exercise Frequency & Ensure Consistent Results with Our Free Exercise Journal

Many struggle to workout consistently throughout the year. Consistent exercise is the only way to attain and maintain your health and fitness goals.

Read this post and download our free workout tracking software (see below) and you will have a major advantage when it comes to working out consistently all year long.

Have you ever kept a food log? Didn’t you make better choices just because you were more aware and conscious of them? It’s the same thing with exercise. Using an exercise log will help you be self-accountable, motivated, and make it very hard to lie to yourself! (We all do it from time to time).

Download the free exercise log below, use it, and see for yourself.

Many of us say to ourselves “Oh I workout 3x per week for an hour” and believe it. But we are talking about our ideal week, when everything lines up perfect, work isn’t too busy, and we don’t have to travel or aren’t sick.

But the non-ideal weeks count just as much! Your body never stops adapting, and when you average them all together, you will find that the number in your head and the number in the log to not match! This forces us to be truthful with ourselves. As my grade school gym teacher always used to say, “If you cheat, you are cheating yourself!”.

Download Your Free Exercise Journal Now! (excel file)

Exercise Frequency and Results

One of the biggest challenges people have is exercising consistently. For many people, exercise is a cyclical activity; they exercise their New Year’s Resolution in January, they exercise before beach vacations or reunions, and they exercise in anticipation of the summer.

But what happens during the rest of the year? For many, we spend our time moving away from health and fitness. Supposedly, 75% of weight gain occurs between Halloween and Valentine’s Day. While some inconsistent exercise is way better than no exercise at all, it is impossible to reach your goals working out this way; it ends up being 2 steps forward, 2 steps back (or in many cases, 2 steps forward 3 steps back!).

If you fall into this category, don’t get frustrated! There are allot of ways to increase your motivation and ability to workout consistently. Read on to learn how to track your workout frequency and workout more consistently.

Working out in a bikini is kinda silly. When getting started, workout in whatever clothing makes you feel comfortable.

Progressive Exercise: Use It or Lose It!

First, it is important to understand why consistent exercise frequency is important. A better understanding will help you put this knowledge into action! To reach your goals, exercise (both strength training and cardiovascular training) must be progressive. In other words, each new workout builds on the previous workouts.

If you stop going to the gym for over 2 weeks, you start to loose strength and adaptation. The next time you workout, you have to retrace your steps. Yes, you should get it back quicker, all things being equal, but this is like swimming up stream or swimming past a break while surfing; if you ain’t moving forward, you are moving backward!

The body adapts very specifically to the forces it encounters. If you go to the gym and do the same workout over and over, you will be training your body to maintain what you have already achieved (and potentially opening yourself up to injury caused by repetitive motions and not enough variety, but that is a tangent). So if you want to lose weight, lets say 20 pounds, and you build yourself up to running 3 miles and loose 10 lbs in the process, if you keep doing the same workout, you will be training your body to stay the same weight, instead of losing the last 10 lbs.

You must build on top of your previous exercise accomplishments and gradually push your abilities, in order for your body to keep adapting and moving in the right direction. There are many ways to do this, including changing the amount of time exercising, the speed/intensity, the amount of rest, or the kind of exercise.

Here is the key principle; your fitness goals rely on a solid foundation of health, and health is a dynamic process, not a static state. Your body is a finely tuned instrument! It will adapt to whatever the conditions and forces that are being imposed on it. This is why astronaut lose bone mass without gravity, and people who don’t stay intellectually active are more susceptible to dementia/Alzheimer, etc. USE IT OR LOSE IT!

When you take those 3 weeks (or more) off, you body does not stop adapting, it just starts adapting in the other direction. “Life is easy, I don’t need these muscles or a strong heart”. At this point you are moving backward and AWAY from your goals.

Therefore your number one goal is to keep what you have already got! And the best way to ensure that is to workout smart and consistently. Many people get caught up in trying to find out “the best exercise for abs” or “the best workout for losing weight and being toned”.

Yes, how you workout is very important. But, as long as you don’t have any major issues or joint problems, I think it is just as important to focus on consistency. Just get into a groove, workout regularly, try different things gradually, explore your bodies abilities respectfully.

There are an infinite number of great exercises and new techniques out there. If you want to try some to get started, that’s cool, but I make a commitment to exercise frequency and stick to it for maximum results.

Don’t be intimidated by strange looking equipment!

How to Use the Free Exercise Journal

Here it is, just download and save this file. I suggest making a short cut on your desktop, so it is easy to remember to update it every day. It only takes 30 seconds to update the sheet daily, and at the end of the month you will know exactly how much you have worked out.

This sheet focuses on being more aware of how often you workout. More advanced people will want a program that will track the kinds of workouts by exercises, so they can manipulate the acute training variables (type of exercise, intensity/weight, how often, tempo, rest, sets, etc).

But for both beginner and advanced, I suggest you download this free tool and use it. The results will most likely surprise you! This tool forces you to be truthful, and the truth shall set you free

• Download the sheet and save it to your desktop. (Click the “save as excel” button at the top right of the box.)
• Put your name, the month, and the year at the top of the sheet.
• Fill out the dates for the month, so that it matches up with the days. (The first month is November.  If it is no longer November, fill out the correct dates for the current month).
• BIG SECRET- Even if you are in the middle of the month, don’t wait until next month to start tracking.  Just start in the middle of the month.  Yes, it will give you incomplete data for that month, but the point is to get into a habit with exercise frequency, not have a perfect spreadsheet.  If you wait you risk “never getting around to it”.  The time is NOW!
• Every day, put in the number of minutes you spent doing cardio and the number of minutes you spent strength training, in their respective columns. (Yes, always warm up, but don’t include it in the #.)

• Grade both your cardio workout and your strength training workout on a scale of 1-10. (10 being an amazing workout, however you want to define that is fine for now.)
• If you don’t workout on a certain day, just leave that column blank.
• At the end of the month, look at the bottom of that spread sheet. It will give you the total amount of time you spent doing cardio and strength training, in both minutes and hours.
• It will also show you what percentage of your time you spent exercising.
• At the bottom of the spread sheet, there is a tab for month 2.  Put in the next month’s dates and start putting in your exercise numbers.  This software allows you to keep all your exercise frequency information for 1 year in the same place!
• For the following year, just save the spread sheet under a new name to create another spreadsheet for that year.
• Leave some comments at the bottom! How could the software be made better? What did you like about it? Where you surprised by the #’s? Do you find your results frustrating or inspiring? Let me know!

If you are having trouble downloading this free exercise journal, please contact us and we will send you the file immediately

How Much Should You Exercise?

This is a great question, and the answer really varies. First and foremost, get in the gym and track your frequency, don’t focus so much on being perfect. Just do your best and get your body moving. Start with whatever feels comfortable, and gradually introduce more discomfort.

Once you have built yourself up, you will most likely need to spend 1 hour 5x/week in the gym at a minimum. Please do not feel overwhelmed if you are just starting out. Just take it one step at a time and start slow. Keep in mind that allot of that time is spent resting in between sets, and that not every workout should be high intensity.

There are 168 hours in the week, 5 hours represent less than 3% of a week!!! It’s so little, and yet it is a major investment in your mind, body, and soul. I know what you are thinking, “But I am sleeping for 30% of that time!”. That is true, but even accounting for 8 hours sleep per day, and 30minutes of travel time each day you go to the gym, exercising 5x per week for 1 hour is still only 6.7% of the total time in a week (total “waking” time).

Seriously, right now you can start investing 6.7% of the time you are awake on this planet to make sure that you are healthy, happy, strong, balanced, and disease free. Seems like a great investment to me, doesn’t it!?!? And yes you may be more tired at first, but after some time, you will have more energy and more focus, allowing you to be more effective the other 92.3% of the time. Sometimes, less is more

Those who do not find time for exercise will have to find time for illness. -Earl of Derby

Two and a half (2.5) hours strength training and two and a half (2.5) hours of cardio a week is a good guideline to go by for a beginner with good general health and no major joint issues, although this is very general guideline. The golden rule is to start slow, err on the side of caution, progress gradually, and always listen to your body.

Beginners should emphasize control, form, and slower tempo for reps, to minimize risk without sacrificing effectiveness. For guidance on starting a exercise program, check out our blog post How to Exercise.

Yes, your goals, genetics, diet, and lifestyle are all going to effect how much and in what way you workout, but no matter who you are, you are a human being! The human body was designed to move allot! Our ancestors used allot of energy just to survive every single day: hunting, gathering, building, fighting, climbing, hiking, running, transporting. That is what you are built for! Some estimates have our ancestors covering 10 miles every day.

Clearly, this is not the world most of us live in today, but we can replicate these forces in the gym in very little time. (Just 6.7% of the time you are awake, to be exact!)

Download the exercise journal, track your exercise frequency, and let me know how you are doing!

If you have any comments or questions, please post below and I will get back to you! Do you like this tool? Where you surprised by the results? Will you commit to updating the sheet each month? What is missing from the exercise journal? Let me know!

Take care and stay fit!
Johnny Fitness

Jonathan Angelilli aka Johnny Fitness has worked as a full time trainer for over 8 years, has completed 9 certifications, trains several celebrities, and is currently the Training Director of Dynamic Results, an upscale fitness and lifestyle company in NYC. He witnessed the power of tracking exercise personally, and with his clients.