Good way to track workouts?

It is pretty geeky but i am using a google spreadsheet to track everything and I can access it from the various computers I use.

I am following New Rules for Lifting (for women) and it is a lot to keep track of but the main thing is to make sure I am progressing.

The night before I check to see what workout is next and what I last lifted for each excercise. Then I put what I aim to do in Evernote on which synchs to my iPhone. You could just enter it in any note app...

At the gym I have my iPhone with me and refer to it and make notes.

Later I enter what I actually accomplished.

It sounds like a lot but it does not take much time and I like tracking things.:bigsmile:

I was using MFP's exercise tab, but I also like to track max and average heart rate, water intake, tape measurements and weight, and exactly what I do at the gym (number of reps etc, whether I have progressed in dumbell weight or resistance levels on the machines) so I have a small desktop diary and I just note everything down there. Every month I also screen print the line graph I can get on MFP for exercise minutes and calories burned and stick that in my diary to make sure I am progressing and not slacking :-)
I'm not particularly good with spreadsheets so this works for me, it's quick and easy.
Be interesting to hear what everyone else does...

What I used to do is just take a small spiral notepad to the gym and short pen. I've seen others use clipboards. Worked great. My workout partner still does it this way.

What I use now is the Jefit app on my phone. It murders my pad and pencil. Program what exercises you do and on what days, and when you do them it shows the weight you used the last time, even if it was months ago. Beats flipping thru pages. Also has graphs and calculates your theoretical 1 rep max on each exercise. When I'm done, it prompts me to sync to the cloud, so I can log in on any cpu and check my stats.

Highly recommend.

Thanks for the App I've not used it yet but it looks good.

After reading about it on this thread, I tried the Jefit app. It looks really super, but just isn't for me because I am so set in my ways.

My weight lifting workout is a little weird, but it works for me and I have been doing it for years and love the results so please don't criticize! LOL I do not want to change it at this point. After stretching/warmup I do two sets of 10 on each of 20 Nautilus, Cybex, and Keiser weight machines at my gym, which is all the ones I can find that are reasonably different from one another (except for the leg extension machine which is too tough on my knees). I try not to rest any longer between sets than it takes me to do a set, so this is almost (but not quite) like circuit training, I suppose. There is almost no waiting at my gym, so it takes me 50 minutes to do the 20 weight machines; with 10 minutes warmup/stretching it comes to an even hour.

Anyway, to record it I list all the machines in the order in which I do them, in the iPhone "Notes" app that came with my iPhone. After each, I list the weight I am doing, and the highest weight I have ever done on that machine if it differs. So, the only entries I have to make are when I change the weight on a machine. I keep my iPhone in its tough Otterbox case, clipped to the waistband of my gym shorts.

Then at home, I compute the tons lifted (2x10x20xAve_Wt/2000), and enter that plus any cardio I might have done into my weight loss Excel file. Recently I have been trying to incorporate some cardio for weight loss reasons, so right now I might say "lifting 17 tons, exercycle 15 minutes 3.7 miles" or something like that.

Crude, but it works for me. The main problem with this method is that it doesn't tell me how much I was lifting last year, and so on. It only tells me what I lifted last time, and what the maximum I ever lifted on that machine was. I would have liked Jefit if I could have named the exercises and arranged them in the order I like.