It is important to learn how and when to keep records of your progress in a bodybuilding program. As time goes by, the bodybuilding routine might become just another routine and despite attending the gym and keeping to the diet, gains become marginal or even rare. At other times, a particular exercise, dieting regime or training schedule may not work in stimulating muscle gains at the very max of your potential. Documentation comes in as a very important tool of evaluating the achievements or the lack thereof, of the specific elements of the program.

If you keep records of the progress, it is easy to discover when results dilly-dally or when the progress is very good. More so, when a particular exercise, frequency, diet or intensity is working, the gains are quantified on records in a bid to amplify and maintain them at their very maximal.

So which records should a body builder keep? Very many, unfortunately. The first and the most important is the dieting program. This constitutes two individual schedules that must be reviewed alongside each other. The first is what a body builder has planned to eat, what is required by the body at that particular training level in terms of nutrients. The second is what the body builder actually eats every single day. While the planned diet regimen should be drawn up at the very beginning of a program and then evaluated and modified severally during the training, the record of daily nutritional and non-nutritional intake should be logged at the end of every day without fail. Comparing the two always paints a sordid picture of how a body builder is fairing on the dieting front.

The second type of records that a body builder should keep is training schedules. The training should be broken down into specifics such as constitutes a single training session. The session should identify which exercises to be performed and at which intensity level (no of reps and sets at a particular speed). These single sessions should then accumulate to weekly schedules of 3-4 sessions per week and into months. Within a month, the training should focus on a particular facet of training as conceived by the training goals so that within several months, a particular short-term objective of training is identified, pursued and hopefully achieved. Records of daily workouts pulling together into weeks, months and ultimately a year or even years, help determine the success of a training program in view of bodybuilding goals.

Finally, it also important to document gains in weight gain, muscle mass and strength or even muscle definition. Whatever is planned for and targeted by a training schedule within a specified time frame, should be evaluated constantly and recorded. Recording gains in quantifiable measurements has two key advantages. For one, it helps motivate the body builder to keep pursuing the greater goals especially if the gains being achieved day in day out are impressive, and secondly to determine whether the training and dieting schedules are bringing results. Evaluating both training and dieting suitability is only enabled by updated records of gains in specific measurements. Whichever element of the bodybuilding training that is found wanting or ineffective in stimulating maximal gains, can then be modified or dropped out all together.

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